I agree with Eric and Anthony completely (sounds like a radio show ). From the tool perspective we have our PM's try to ensure they have a properly formed project plan to begin with. What I mean by that is using the Predecessors, Task Constraints, Assignments, Durations, and Planned Hours properly. If I look at someone's project plan (and we do a monthly audit of two random projects) and I see they don't have predecessors, it's a red flag. That means every time a task is late, they now have to adjust the date of that task and every subsequent successor task. And since they don't have preds, they don't always know which tasks are true successors. So they're "spending 50% of their time" or more sifting through a project plan to update it. And it leaves a lot of room for mistakes. If they're setting proper predecessors, they can simply adjust the date of the late task and the tool will adjust all the successor tasks. So the update should be minutes. And then you know what that late task has done to your overall plan and can make further adjustments if necessary. We recommend they update their plan weekly (at least) and like Eric (and others) we have dashboards and reports to show items that we want to track (i.e. recently completed tasks, upcoming tasks, issues, etc.). After the initial set up of a project plan (which does take a long time to create and get good estimates), it takes me about an hour each week to properly update my plan and other ancillary tasks (i.e. send status report, etc.). Vic Alejandro, PMP, CSM | IT | Sr. IT Project Manager Denver Water | t: (303-628-7262) | c: (303-319-6473) "http://www.denverwater.org/">
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