You made your project plan (episode 1). Then you verified that it was at the right level of detail (episode 2)… knowing that there is an uncertainty that you will discover.
How will/should you incorporate these elements into the project plan update?
Whoa, slow down! We are going to integrate EVERYTHING into the schedule, aren’t we ?!
So how do we choose what is important? How do we know that it will be important on the next project? In short, how do we do it?
1/ By applying the FLOW Project Management method,
you can use the Fever Chart to identify times when you have consumed buffer.
2/ Take these events and measure the impact it had on the buffer consumption.
- If the buffer has been significantly consumed by this event (10%) then the event should be considered in the future project,
- If the buffer was not significantly consumed, it may not be worthwhile to go into more detail.
- Then look at the tasks where you have recovered buffer and ask yourself if the actions you have taken, which have recovered buffer, should be integrated into the future project plan. This will avoid having a plan that only gets more complex.
3/ Forgetting a task.
Ah!, the famous task that we forgot to specify in the project and “that it would be good to take into account for the next time because you never know”. In this case, go back to the previous article to see if this task fits into the criteria for cutting. In fact, very often, these tasks are “details” that reassure but that ultimately make the project more complex to read.
At this point; we have seen how to create the plan, check that it is controllable and we have just seen how the feedback around its execution can help us to update it.
However, it does not say what we could do to reduce the length of the plan and gain control over the execution.
More in episode 4…