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Capture status
The project manager needs to continuously monitor the project to ensure its appropriate progress, and to enable the
team to react as soon as possible to any change. Many alternative means may be used to track the status:
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Quick, daily meetings with the entire project team, also called "scrum meetings” are useful to understand what team
members have accomplished since last meeting, and what they plan to accomplish before the next meeting. It also
allows the team to identify any blocking issues. See [SCH04] for guidance on scrum meetings.
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Basic metrics, ideally automatically generated from the tools at hand, or manually assembled. The Artifact: Project Plan should outline which metrics the project should use.
Examples of such metrics include Report: Iteration Burndown and Report: Project Burndown charts, which are reports on the Artifact: Work Items List. See also Concept: Metrics for more information.
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Communicate status
Communicating project status is as important as gathering it. Communication is usually done at two levels: the task
level and project level.
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Task Level – Communicated within the project team: status can be communicated through quick, daily
meetings. This allows you to combine the status capturing with the status communications.
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Project Level – Communicated to the stakeholders and the project team: status is usually
communicated through core metrics rather than detailed information. This can be done through meetings, e-mail, or
Web publishing.
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Handle exceptions and problems
One of the project manager's key responsibilities is to know about the project team's problems and issues. The manager
needs to focus on problems that are blocking progress. A quick, daily meeting is usually a good way to monitor those
problems and issues.
Identify the cause and impact of problems and exceptions as they arise. Identify possible solutions for problems that
have an immediate impact on the short-term goals and objectives and identify who needs to be involved in implementing
the solution. Then, define the corrective actions and implement them.
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Identify and manage risks
Identify risks as soon as the project starts and continue identifying and managing risks throughout the project. The
risk list should be revisited weekly, or as a minimum once per iteration, see Concept: Risk and Artifact: Risk List for more details. The entire team should be involved in
identifying and mitigating risk.
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Reprioritize work as needed
| When a team is falling significantly behind, or critical problems occur, it may be necessary to reprioritize tasks to
ensure that the team delivers a useful product increment by the end of the iteration, while maximizing stakeholder value.
In these rare cases, the project manager should work with the team and stakeholders on revising the iteration plan and, as
necessary, reduce the emphasis on less critical tasks. |
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