Dashboards for your projects

When you put all your pieces together to deliver excellence!

Project Dashboards

For project management, you’re always going to deal with the triple constraint of scope, cost and schedule. How you manage it and apply the discipline to project management will determine the success of your efforts.

Build a dashboard that describes your critical success factors on a one-page chart and use that as your guide for the program.   Each dashboard can be different depending upon your program, business and unique challenges.

I typically always use red/yellow/green to identify the status of the triple constraints. The other metrics that I track will be on the milestone actuals and then a forward look that tracks the upcoming milestones by week. With a forward look you can orient the team to the schedule and apply the right focus to work through any issues that may arise with the schedule.

If your program is on track and hitting all your milestones then the dashboard’s focus will be different than if you’re behind schedule and trying to recover.

The critical issues on the above program are the management of the shared resources that must be monitored throughout the lifecycle of the program. The scope management and the communication actions appear to be on track, which are typically the other two major risks that can cause a program to fail.

Hopefully, you’ve picked up some valuable advice in this chapter. Remember to use checklists to prepare yourself for a successful start up with your program. The seeds of failure are sown in the first 30 days!

Maturity Models

Maturity models are a great way to assess your organization’s capability and make sure you have countermeasures in place to mitigate any areas of concern.

I’ve developed a model that I use for the critical factors that should be in place to effectively manage programs. I’ve used the DMAIC model that’s incorporated with Six Sigma to define the continuous loop for improving the maturity of your processes just as you would in applying it to manage your work in a controlled fashion.

Hopefully, you’ve added a few new tools to your portfolio that can help you manage your projects more effectively in this article. Be sure and look for upcoming publications in this series where I will explore other methods that mitigate your risks and turn you into the outstanding program manager that will deliver on time on budget, each and every time.