Project Management Checklists For Dummies

Chapter 12

Checking Each Stage

In This Chapter

Staying in control

Monitoring against an up-to-date plan

Three areas of stage checks

Checklists for checking

Planning a project thoroughly is essential, but if you have any knowledge of project management at all you’ll know that the trick then is to keep it on track, monitoring it against the plan. One thing’s for sure, your project isn’t going to go exactly to plan but, strangely perhaps, that makes the plan even more important. It forms a baseline that you correct to.

You must keep the plan up to date if it’s going to be any use to you for control. Checking the stage must begin then with updating your Stage Plan from the information and actuals (time sheet information and spending information) that comes in with the Team Progress Reports.

Your stage checks should be in three areas:

• Team progress: To assess the position of each team as you look at the Team Progress Reports.
• Whole stage position: Having got all of that progress information in, take a wider look to see how the whole stage is progressing, including some forward projections ...