Eliminating The Greatest Weakness Of Project Management

Eliminating The Greatest Weakness Of Project Management
The greatest weakness in the project management method is that there is no easy means to track what is happening in terms of what people are actually doing. People do actions (sometimes called ToDo?s) to complete project tasks. Simply tracking project tasks and reporting progress does not provide the detail required to meaningfully link what is actually happening. This article identifies the reason for this gap and offers a workable solution.

Traditional project management methods are designed for, and provide significant assistance to, project managers. But projects are done by more people than the project manager. The project manager usually manages the project, leaving other people to do the work to complete project tasks. When the other people doing the project are in one location, such as on a building site, the project manager can see what is happening and take the required steps to keep the project on schedule.

However many projects are completed by people who are physically separated, so the project manager cannot see what is actually happening. In this case, the project manager has to rely on reports of progress that may be interpreted differently by people doing project tasks to the project manager (or the project scheduler).

People tend to report optimistically until it is very obvious that they cannot meet the scheduled task due date. At this time, they admit that the task will not be completed on time. The problem for the project manager is that when many people admit their task will be late, the overall project schedule can be blown out with little prior warning and few options for the project manager to recover.

Over 15 years, Dr Neil Miller and other members of TASKey have observed many people doing many tasks. The usual process when someone is made responsible to get a task completed is to: Decide the goal, identify the people who can contribute, and conduct a meeting (either physical or virtual). At the meeting; identify the actions required to complete the task, make a list of actions required (usually in date/time order), allocate actions to people who record what they need to do when and with who. After the meeting, people do the actions/ToDo?s that they agreed to do.

Feedback from people implementing tasks is largely in the form of after activity estimates of the % completion of the tasks they are responsible for. There is little real-time interaction with the action/ToDo's being done to complete the project. Yet most collaboration between people occurs at the action/ToDo level, and not at the task level that is managed by traditional project management.

This process of working out what people should put on their ToDo list for the task is usually considered to be more time management than project management. While it is not proposed that a project manager become involved in individual and team time management, the project manager needs to know how people?s actions are affecting each project task and the overall project. This fundamental link can be achieved by calculating task progress on the basis of actions completed. Reporting progress on the basis of actions completed also facilitates real-time task progress reporting and reduces the need for people to spend a lot of time telling the project manager (or scheduler) what they are doing.

Closing this gap between tasks and actions/ToDo?s provides the project manager with the real-time feedback required for timely, quality decision making. Plus collaboration between people is easier and more focused on doing work that will contribute directly to the completion of project tasks.

TASKey has developed web software that closes the gap between project tasks and the actions/ToDo?s being done to complete the project task. The software makes it easier for people doing a project to see how they need to contribute and to automatically report progress in real-time. The method also provides context by handling other tasks people are doing (including actions for tasks in other projects), so every person can receive a comprehensive ToDo list of actions/ToDo?s. Keeping peoples? To Do lists synchronized makes it easier for people to work together.

By eliminating the great weakness in project implementation, the web software (TASKey Me2Team for small projects and TASKey TEAM for enterprises) allows people doing the project to be better informed and to better contribute. In addition, the project manager and other stakeholders can receive real-time information of what is actually happening. So everyone can make better more timely decisions.

To get your projects done visit www.Me2Team.com and to get projects and corporate processes done across an enterprise visit www.taskey.com

By,

Dr Neil Miller


project, project management software, web project management software, project managers, distributed project management, distributed project management software.
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