Three Simple Questions
From a government program management review meeting this week, I came away with three simple questions that must be answered by any project management process. Anyone claiming to be a project manager, program manager, or anyone conjecturing that their new, shiny, and magical project management method should replace the one we're using now:
- Is the project making progress as planned?
- Is management - project, business and technical - pro-actively addressing problems in the project as they arise?
- Are there any surprises coming our way?
That's it. That's all there is. Ok, maybe a few more questions. But if we can't answer these questions in some credible manner, then the project is not being managed. And since project management is a verb, "management" is what project managers do, they "manage projects."
All the other activities around projects, no matter how important they are, they appear to be, or they want to be - if you can't answer these questions, everything else is a moot point.
