If your project discovery has completed and the project has kicked off already, you’ve probably either seen our project plan or wondered how we are managing things. After years of experience, we are applying best practice by collaboratively planning in detail, and then closely managing and connecting daily and weekly to complete tasks, deliverables and the overall plan. An example plan looks like this:
Apart from the usual: Task, Status, Start / Finish dates and Owner, we also track dependencies, % complete, baseline dates vs current (days variance).
The simple auto colour settings make it clear where things are at and what to focus on, and the PM will check the plan daily to trigger tasks to start, remind people what they should be working on and whats coming up.
In our project meetings we save wasted time by running 15min stand ups to only discuss whats not done and why, and to prep tasks coming up. Often team members update the plan themselves, and every plan update is date-stamp recorded for transparency.
On top of this the plan has the Change, Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Decisions logs and a weekly task tracker embedded - its a one stop shop. And driven off the Smartsheet is also a dashboard summarising the status for Phases, Milestones, tasks, and the days variance forecast vs baseline target date.
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