The Five Immutable Principles of Project success must be in place for any real chance of showing up on time, on budget, and on specification.
Now that these are recognized, what is the evidence that these principles are being met? What are the tangible documents that represent the measures of success for the principles?
These include:
- The Work Breakdown Structure - what are the products to be produced and the processes needed to produce these products? The WBS does not show the processes as standalone items. The processes are embedded in the product elements of the WBS tree.
- The Organization Breakdown Structure - who is going to do the work?
- The integration of the WBS and the OBS - so everyone on the project knows what they are accountable for.
- Schedule the work - in some way to show when this work is being performed and dependencies between the work efforts.
- The identified deliverables - what is the customer going to get during and at the end of the project?
- The budget - how much are we planning on spending for the project work?
- The Costs - how much are we spending against this budget?
- What are the variances - what are the differences between the planned and actual costs. But more importantly what is the variances in the schedule.
- Sum all these up - roll up the cost and schedule variances to the project level, ready for decision making.
- Take action - to correct the variances for cost and schedule gaps.
- Incorporate these changes - so the project can get back to GREEN.
