A colleague commented on my recent post about measuring the critical project status. In his opinion this kind of measurement is an overkill for small projects. I asked him in return what defines a small project: Short in time? Few risks? Anxious client? Complex tasks? Number of people involved? Top executive exposure?
In November I took over a one month work package of a bigger project, where we created 18 profiles of telecommunication and IT vendors depending on specific characteristics the client defined. The client was very anxious about the success of this work package, as it would be presented in a board meeting and used by top executives over the next three months. Some of the characteristics we had to find out and describe for each vendor were fairly complex and required a lot of background know-how about the client’s business and his strategic goals. We also got some complex formulas the client uses to asses some financial statements. While we were a team of three experts, each profile needed to go through two review panels of stakeholders. Process, baby ;).
You can see that this one month project was pretty scary. we needed to cover our work in order to avert blame for potential project delays, and to make sure that our client knew what was expected from his side so he would shine at the board meeting.
I used an excel dashboard I already created for numerous other project. It works after the same principle as large projects:
The last step of course assumes that the reviews actually took place. In the Excel sheet, I enter values 1 (not yet done), 2 (25% done), 4 (75% done), and 5 (100% done). The reason that I start with 1 and not 0 is simply that the font I use has nice Harvey balls for 1 to 5 (the font is in the zip file below for your convenience).
![A project plan example with Excel [(c) Thorsten Claus]](http://www.playoutintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/20080302_project-plan-example.png)
The picture on the right is a snapshot from November 13th. The dotted line is the completion plan. If the work status falls over 6% behind plan, the column becomes yellow. If we fall more than 15% behind plan, the status becomes red. However, we wanted to show that some of the red and yellow status reports were not due to our slow work, but because our client couldn’t review the profiles in a timely manner due to other issues. The thick black line shows our work actual work, but with error lines if our client would’ve reviewed the profiles in time as planned. if you follow the top of the error lines you can see that the work from our side is actually above plan, but the review boards are slow to answer.
I attached the Excel sheet together with the Font for the project status for your convenience, so you can play around a little bit. The sheet is protected, but there is no password :)
