How to monitor and control projects

Monitoring and Controlling is the largest and continuous part of the project management. It keeps eye on everything that’s happing in/out of the project and adjusts as needed.  
A good project manager is constantly monitoring every single thing happing in the project. If you find the problem latter it’s hard and more expensive to solve it.
The below practices need to be followed by a project manager for an effective monitor and control of the project:

Soft Skills in Agile Projects

Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance an individual's interactions, job performance and career prospects. Unlike hard skills, which are about a person's skill set and ability to perform a certain type of task or activity, soft skills are interpersonal and broadly applicable.

A set of skills that influence how we interact with each other, it includes such abilities as effective communication, creativity, analytical thinking, diplomacy, flexibility, change readiness, problem solving, leadership, team building and listening skills.

Negative Stakeholder Management

There are positive and negative stakeholders in every project (according to PMBOK). Positive ones will benefit from project implementation, for example their work will become more effective, more automated, easier, and more fun. At the same time negative stakeholders will have problems once the project is implemented. For example, they will be fired because their job will be done by new software.

Type of Project Reports

Most of the organizations have their own template for reports, in addition to that the Project Manager and your team has their own format.

Each report takes own time to collect information, write, read, maintain and act on the action items.

Based on my experience, come up with the important reports required in the project, purpose and the important aspects needs to be covered in the report.

Importance of Non Functional Requirements

The functional requirements are day-to-day requirements which business users and stakeholders needs in the product.

It is important to consider the other requirements also; these are called “Non-Functional Requirements” and fits into the organization's operational environment. This is the obvious requirements that your business users may not think about it.

Velocity in Agile Projects

This article talks about calculating the team velocity of the agile project and addressing the benefit of the team velocity.

Velocity is an extremely simple, powerful method for accurately measuring the rate at which teams consistently deliver business value. 

It is a measure of how much product backlog items the team can complete in the given amount of time.

It is used the compare the iterations for the given team on a given project, the note is only completed work counts for calculating the velocity.

Kanban Board for Agile Projects

In agile projects it’s common practice to visualize and project status in white board of the project war room.
The lean management in the production industry also uses this kind of practice.
“Kanban” in Japanese means, loosely translated card or sign. The kanban boards used to view the three point’s time task and team so that the whole team understands the current status of the project and work n an autonomous, motivated and collaborative manner.

Agile Risk Management

 The agile risk management and the process is the similar to the traditional risk management. (Refer risk management). The process integrates into the life cycle and the frequency of running varies considerably in the agile.

Problem Solving Skills

Problem Solving is one of the key personalities of the project manager or the any individuals.
The experience and approach for solving the problem varies from person to person.
I would like to share my experience of skills needs to be developed, how to differentiate the problems and method to solve the problem.

Early Life Support

What is Early Life Support?

Based on ITIL, Early Life Support provided for a new or Changed IT Service for a period of time after it is released. During Early Life Support the IT Service Provider may review the KPIs, Service Levels and Monitoring Thresholds, and provide additional Resources for Incident and Problem Management.
The early life support process is part of the service transition life cycle and taken place after the release and deployment plan and testing.

WBS template download

The project managers need to use the correct template for the WBS and constantly improve for the project success.

I have prepared the WBS for different projects like waterfall, production support, enhancements and others.
To download sample WBS click on sample WBS link or download from the Article Download section in the right side of the blog site.



The following are few guidelines from my side to improve the WBS.

• Involve the people who will be doing the work.
• Take the lesson learnt from the previous projects.
• Keep your WBS updated to reflect the changes.
• Ensure the milestones are captured and tracked.

Agile Scrum check list

The idea of this article is to define the set of practices and process for the agile development project based on my experience.
I believe the good practices and checklist are essential for the agile project to measure the performance of the project.
The project teams are starting with agile adoptions and often struggle to find where they are standing. The check list helps to agile team to figure out the painful area and overcome from that.

Release and Deployment Approaches

Release and Deployment Approaches:

Release management is responsible for planning, scheduling and controlling the movement of new or changed services in the form of a release packages, to both the testing and the live production environments.

Any new system will bring about change in the structure of the client’s organization. However, users don't always welcome change. A degree of resistance to organizational changes is normal. The project manager's biggest challenge is guiding the client through the necessary changes. The release and deployment approach are:

ITIL Financial Management

Financial Management for IT is one of five components in the ITIL Service Delivery area and part of Service Strategy process.
 It determines the costs of services and provides financial accounting support to ensure expenditures fall within approved plans and that funds are well-spent.
The role of Financial Management varies depending upon the view of IT within the company. Some companies view IT as an expense center, some as a profit center, and some as a cost-recovery center. However, in all cases, Financial Management supports the "business" of IT.

Program Management

Program Management is the discipline of managing a group of interdependent projects. In management’s hierarchical structure, program management comes between project management and project portfolio management.

Manage changes in your project

Perform Integrated change control is the process of reviewing all change requests, approving changes, managing the changes to the deliverables, organizational process assets (OPA), project management and project management plan.

Project Performance management

Project Performance management is used to track an organization’s progress against its strategic plan and specific performance goals. While Performance Measures can be applied to individual projects to ensure that deadlines are met and costs are controlled, etc., it is essential for the Project Manager to understand how the project itself supports the organization’s strategy, and how the project will impact or influence the organization’s key Performance Measures.
It’s happened to nearly every project manager sometime in their career. They’re given the requirement to provide detailed performance reporting on a project and end up spending most of their time entering hours worked into work packages in Microsoft Project and estimating percent complete on these packages – on a daily basis. Whether the requirement for that level of reporting was real or perceived, the project manager finds that he’s unable to manage the day to day activities of his project because he’s too busy trying to measure the project’s performance.

Top 10 Success Factors for Managing Project

It might be difficult to define the success of the project.              

You'd think that delivering what the client wants on time and on budget would be considered success and it would, but there are other ways to achieve a successful outcome. Each client will have their own idea of success. One client may be willing to sacrifice features for a quicker delivery, another may be happy to extend the timeline to add in additional features. In both cases, the client gets what they want and the project is considered a success. In both cases, the project did not deliver on time, on budget with agreed functionality. This is where we need to start thinking outside the square.

Applying below simple techniques will help you avoid many common problems that befall many project managers: