Identifying the Project Vital Signs

In this podcast, Ricardo makes a comparison between monitoring of the project and monitoring of a patient in an Intensive Care at the hospital. He explains that the Project Manager should monitor since the beginning, the project vital signs and based on these signals, identify deviations and take preventive actions for the project remains viable.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. I like to discuss the Project Vital science. Y I like to talk and discuss this. I had several discussions through email with one of the readers of my books about how I can check, and I can see early alarms for the problems that I can face. And then immediately I started making, and then Knology with someone in the intensive care at the hospital.

If we go to the intensive care, what we can see there, it's the bad with the patient and may be in the back of a huge amount of equipment that will control the blood pressure, the heart, and all vital signs to make sure that we are monitoring the patient 24 hours a day. Why we do this in the intensive care is to receive early signs to receive an alarm if or something wrong happens now built in the breach to the real life, to our project management life.

We need to develop all the vital signs for our project like we did in the intensive care unit. And the question now is which will be the vital signs that are, that we'll be using in my project. So I'd like to make four quick suggestions for you. First one time. I'm very confident that time it's a very good way of measuring problems, but not solving then.

So time management, its like our thermometer. I sat this many, many times in other Podcast. So first the vital sign is not the final deadline, but we need to split and insert in our project plan some milestones and we need to control the reach of this milestones. So this is the first vital sign. So to have a milestone chart where I can see if any of my critical in my top milestones are changing or moving to a later time.

So this is the first vital sign. The second one is the cost. So I need to break down the costs into resources and now So project phases and tasks and I need to control this and create index of that. Reaching, not reaching the costs. If I'm using Earnin, Valerie, I can do this using the SBI or CPI or other measurements inside Ernest Valley. But if I'm not doing that, I need to, to make sure that the money I have I'm spending it properly.

So the way this can be a number of this can be an index X that shows how and performance in the cost. So the first one time, the second one cost, the third one is risk. I was strongest. I suggest you that you produce the risk list for your Project analyze them, prioritize them and using qualitative and quantitative methods, but also monitor them, monitor them to make sure 100% sure that we are running the proper risks and that we know the risks is that we are running or we can do this.

I have a dashboard that I use for my business. I have the dashboard where I can see, okay, a open risks, risks that became problem. Let's suppose I have 100 risks. And now I'm on the fourth month of my Project 35. All of those 100 became problems. So I have an index 35% of all my open risks became a problem. So this is an index that okay, the risks are becoming problems and problems are real problems.

Brisk is not the problem risk. It's only a problem if it becomes a problem, if this happened so I can monitor and control this one and this dashboard is easy, you can make some and that's okay. You can put extreme, very high, high, medium, low, and very low and you can track your risks. Okay? How many of them are in the extreme in month in January and in February and then, and track and see if the risks are going up or are going down.

This will mean that the vital sign of my project is showing that patient or the project is getting worse or is getting better in the risk in a future perspective, the fourth and the last, but not least is the communication I need to track and to check how the stakeholders in the communication process are handling with my project. So I can do this on the meetings like the doctor does with the patient every day.

And then Alice of the health state have the patient and inform to all staff holders at the hospital, the family and tell, okay, the patient is becoming better or is not becoming better. And when we translate this to the Project environment, it's the same. We need to do a control and the checkpoint, a change control point where we can analyze our project basically on this tree, vital signs to prepare the fourth one and see, okay, how I'm coming, Katie, what's going on in this project to avoid more risks, to avoid more delays into a fight, void, more cost overruns.

So this four Vital science communications, RISC time and cost. This fore, we would show up. A lot of people asked me why not scope? Because sometimes your scope is directly related to time. So you can check on the deadlines. Okay? Maybe a milestone. He wasn't mad because of the scope. So the vital sign old, show me a problem. And then I need to look all Project documents. What is going on to understand why that vital sign that is shown on the time side is related to the real problem that I'm having in the project.

So think always, if we not to have the vital signs, we are not currently for a link effectively, our project. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. See you next week with another five minutes PM. Podcast bye.

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