2 management - School of International Business and ...

225 Project Management
Project monitoring consists of the following components:
– Mining information
– Actual-plan comparison
– Project status report
– Trend analyses.
2.3.1.1 MINING INFORMATION
Mining information means gathering actual data about the project results and the project's prog-
ress. The project manager receives this information from various sources, such as:
– Project meetings
– presented project data
– internal project progress reports.
Regular (e.g. weekly) project meetings offer the opportunity to exchange information between project man-
agement and team members. They serve not only for internal project agreement and information for those
participating, but also offer a platform for early recognition of plan deviations and foreseeable disruptions in
the progress of the project. Presented project data are gathered by project management and classified by
them. Effort reports (time/costs) for internal and external workers are classified into respective procedure
and work packets. Furthermore, all other costs during the course of the project are gathered.
Additional information about the project can, if applicable, be taken from internal project progress
reports which are produced by the team members to inform project management. Work results or
interim status as well as the expenses incurred are contained in the project progress reports over the
reporting period. Moreover workers must identify and communicate recognized problems and risks
which emerge over the course of the project.
The gathered information is checked by the project manager before it is fed into the actual-plan
comparison. This check is related to:
– The correctness of the information
(Is the information consistent? Do the calculations have errors?)
– Correct classification of the expenses of the project
(Are tasks outside the project included? Should the reported costs be attributed to the
project?)
– Precision of the estimates of the remaining expenses by the team members
(The accuracy of the estimates by the project manager depends upon the accuracy of the
team members' estimates.)
– Task appropriateness
(Does a team member have too many tasks? Are there team members who have problems
with the tasks, or who are underutilized?).