Track 2000

"I have measured my life with coffee spoons"

T.S.Eliot 1917

In the 1990's, many of the project management practices being applied in business and administrative projects are still based on traditional engineering and construction project management concepts unchanged from the 1960's.

While, the underlying concepts of project management such as estimating and scheduling of tasks via Gantt charts[i] are still valid, many of the traditional project management concepts are blindly implemented in contemporary organisations without little critical evaluation of their relevance to the complex and dynamic projects of the 1990's.

An example of this problem is the approach to project tracking [determining of the status of the progress in the project] and project reporting [the provision of information regarding project status to senior management and stakeholders] implemented in the majority of organisations.

• Earned Value ...what value?
• Problem 1 - Patterns of completion
• Problem 2 - Deliverables aren't always deliverables
• Problem 3 - Scheduling tool implementation
• Problem 4 - Tracking the negatives
• Problem 5 - The costs and all the costs
• The project is fine ... go away
• The operation was a success but the patient died
• Defining project success - case by case
• Tracking success: a contingent view
• Case 1: Over budget but fine
• Case 2: Over budget and not fine
• Case 3: Behind schedule and in trouble
• Case 4: On schedule, under quality and in trouble
• Case 5: Behind schedule, over cost and fine
• There's more - project risk changes everything as well
• So what should we track?
• References

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