answers—meeting phase and project deadlines and staying within the project budget—are constant
concerns. But beyond these issues are questions of quality, cooperation, and results. Thus, your review
should also consist of checking for accuracy and thoroughness, for achievement of a teamwork ideal,
and for comprehensive and correct interpretation of raw data.
2. Finding appropriate applications of the standards. As your project moves foward, how do you test
the standards you have set, and what does your test reveal? This is where many project reviews fall
short. You may work with your team in the definition stages of the project, carefully pinpointing the
desired results to be achieved. However, you also need a method for determining whether the standards
are being met.
3. Deciding what actions, if any, you need to take. What should you do upon discovering problems?
Your team may be falling behind schedule, for example. That’s a problem in itself, but it may also be a
symptom of a deeper team problem. Getting back on schedule may not be as difficult a task as solving
the underlying problem—whether the issue is team-work, ability, communication, effort, authority, or
motivation. Identifying the underlying problem and then taking action to solve it are two areas where
your leadership will be severely tested.
With these problems in mind, you should be able to determine whether your team is following the standards
you have agreed upon and whether you are on schedule and within budget. Beyond that, you also need to
ensure that the project team is, indeed, working as a team. Is one key person doing all of the work while the
rest of the team does nothing? Or are team members failing in what you consider cooperative effort by not
working well together? There are any number of ways that team-related problems can lead to obvious
scheduling and budgeting problems.
Your standards will vary according to the nature of the project. If a large part of the work involves
research—the accumulation of information, compiling, interpreting, and reporting—your standards should
include absolute accuracy and attention to detail. If the project will conclude with a report to management,
you will want to ensure that the information is arranged, indexed, and referenced properly. Each project’s
characteristics point the way to identifying the most likely standards.
In addition to standards for executing the project itself, you will want to apply your own personal
standards—your definition of “excellence.” Since the team’s efforts will at least partially reflect on your
ability to lead, you must be very concerned with the impression your team creates.
How frequently should you review your team’s progress? Some managers consider review to be a formal,
exceptional procedure, as in an employee’s job performance evaluation that takes place once or twice a year.
Others make review an ongoing, constant effort; in every effort and contact, the review question is on their
minds.
No matter what theory you subscribe to as a departmental manager, as project manager you should take the
second, ongoing approach. Review cannot be performed periodically, because problems may arise too
suddenly, and become irreversible too quickly if you are not continually looking for them. The best project
managers are always at least one step ahead of difficulties, solving them before they are allowed to get out of
hand and destroy the course of successful completion.
Remember, too, that projects deal in exceptions rather than routines. In your department, you expect each
employee to handle a range of duties; definition of the job is usually very clear. In projects, though, team
members are asked to execute a range of tasks for which they are qualified but in contexts that are often
foreign to them. Thus, you may have to be more involved in training your team than you are in training
employees executing activities in your department.
As a method and approach, constant review is more likely to ensure success than the periodic review. Waiting
until a problem comes to your attention may mean that you’re taking too passive a role, especially when
projects are executed over a relatively short time span, as most are. By the time you realize the deadline won’t
be met, it may already be too late.
MONITORING AND REPORTING
You will report progress on two levels: first, to the team, as an opportunity to acknowledge effort and
motivate individuals, to identify emerging problems and propose solutions, and to anticipate and prevent
upcoming difficulties; second, to management, either to the person who gave you the project assignment or to
a group of executives who are interested in the results of your team effort.