Update The Plan

In traditional project management, the project leader updates the plan in a meeting or through contact with team members. This has several drawbacks in international projects. First, it is almost impossible to reach everyone. You would be on the telephone all of the time. You could do no other work. Second, it lowers the project leader to the position of a clerk—demeaning. Third, the team does not participate.

You require a better and faster method in which team members collaborate and participate. Here are the steps of a winning method:

Provide network access to all team members so that they can view and update their tasks in the plan.

Supply a minimum amount of training in the project management software (about 4 hours) so that they know how to open the plan, enter tasks, update tasks, and save the results.

Have each team member update their tasks twice a week. Since the detailed tasks are 1–2 weeks in duration, this is not an undue effort. There are typically only a handful of active tasks at any given time. The method for updating is as follows: mark all completed tasks as complete; if there is slippage in a task, then a new task is created that links to the original task, indicating the date created and reason for the task; new tasks are also entered in this way. Recall that there is detail for 3–4 months in advance so the team members will also enter detailed tasks in the future so that you always have the future 3–4 months of the plan in detail.

After the plan has been updated, the project leader reviews the plan to see what changed overall. Has there been a slippage? If so, then you can filter the plan and examine what changed. You can then contact the specific team members that caused the schedule to shift. More issues may be added.

This is a proactive approach that gets the team members to participate and define and update their work. The project leader is then really functioning as the project leader and not doing clerical work. Look at the third step again. Notice that team members cannot just slip a task and input a new duration. If you allow people to do this, you will lose traceability in the plan. Accountability will also suffer. Another benefit of the method is that it saves time since updating is being performed in parallel. In addition, the project leaders’ time is focused on where there are problems.