Project Performance and Delivery

Since project teams are comprised of people, there are times when the project team will become dysfunctional. Team members begin to violate team ground rules and team cohesion and trust are undermined. In this lesson, we discuss a framework for recognizing this and addressing dysfunctional behavior.

Attributes of governance and compliance were discussed in planning. However, it is during project execution that compliance is demonstrated. In this lesson, we discuss the techniques to be used to monitor the level of compliance on a project.

Depending upon your organization’s culture, compliance may be a primary value or it may only be treated as a minor element of project management. In this lesson, we discuss the compliance mindset and multiple methods for strengthening compliance on your project.

There are a growing number of things outside the control of the project team in today’s business environment. The project manager must monitor the industry and organization to assess the impacts. Risk management has expanded to include items outside the control of the project team.

Project compliance with all appropriate standards, regulations, policies, and requirements documents is the responsibility of the project team. However, typically an independent review of compliance, in the form of a project audit, is done to confirm compliance.

Learn how to create and use a project dashboard to communicate project status with both management and your project team.

Earned Value Management is a comprehensive project management technique that combines scope, schedule and resource management into one set of measures.  It starts with task-level planning.

Earned Value Management is a comprehensive project management technique that combines scope, schedule, and resource management into one set of measures.  An element, in fact, the element that provides the name of the technique, is the setting of Earned Value.

Variance occurs when the actual situation is different from the planned or expected situation.  In projects, variance analysis applies to schedule variance and cost variance.  It determines both why the actual situation is different than what was planned and the impact that will have on the project.

Since projects seldom go exactly as planned, part way through a project the project team is typically asked to estimate how much time and money are required to complete the project.

Issues are any request, complaint, or unexpected condition that leads to unplanned, but in scope, work that must be accomplished on a project.  They normally result in the need to implement a workaround in order to resolve them.

Roadblocks are impediments that prevent the Scrum Team from completing Stories and tasks. The Scrum Master is charged with removing or creating a workaround for the Roadblocks.

Contingencies are potential risk response actions that will only be implemented if some triggering event or condition has shown that the risk probability has gone from unlikely to likely.

Scope creep is the uncontrolled expansion to project scope without adjustments to time, cost, and resources.

There are several approaches a project team can take to accelerate project tasks. Each approach has its own unique characteristics and risks.

The project performance is tracked against an integrated set of project baselines that support the achievement of the project’s triple constraint goals and objectives.

The unique nature of projects leads to an inherent level of uncertainty.  Project managers should expect and plan for project change.

A formal documented modification to the project baseline, boundaries, or an artifact.

Lessons Learned are a retrospective look at a project, or phase of a project, to identify best practices to be repeated and performance gaps to be improved.

The Sprint Retrospective is a lessons learned meeting with a focus on identifying opportunities to improve the performance and management of the next Sprint. 

The Backlog Refinement is the update of the Product Backlog based upon what has been completed and what has been learned in a recently completed Sprint.

To fully realize the benefit of a project, often business systems need to change to implement the project results. This transition can be a challenging aspect of the project.

In many organizations, a final report is prepared after all project activities have been completed and the impact of the project results have been demonstrated in business performance metrics.

In addition to transitioning the result of the project into the organization’s operations, projects often have accounts, systems, and resources that must be closed or disposed of before the project is fully closed.