There really isn’t a full-proof method for tracking issues and/or ensuring issues don’t pop up during a project. The key is to stay on top of things and really understand your project(s) and people.

/pd has some great comments about how to potentially track items. I use a simple ‘Red/Yellow/Green/ matrix using Excel to track all project Risks and issues and update the matrix daily if needed. This won’t keep theses issues under control but it does keep the issues in front of the project team to ensure that they are considered.

Thought I’d put my two cents worth in, here. This is an important post, and I think you put your finger on it with your observation that software doesn’t manage projects, people do.

We often mistake our tools for our judgement, and many people in fact actively seek to find tools that will help them do precisely that. But as you point out, however elegant or sophisticated the tool is, it’s still just a tool.

Supervisors want to know about the status of the project, not your mastery of your tools, and they don’t want to be handed your notched-up tools so they can figure out what’s going on themselves.

Steve’s comment about presenters getting caught up in the details (fascinating to them) of their analytical tools, and thus losing the overall perspective vital to those details coming together in a sensible fashion is also right on the money.

If all you know, or all you can express, is the details, you may not even know what the plan is.

Thanks for an excellent presentation.

Thanks for the comments and the additional post. You first and third items really hit close to home. On the first item I often find that when people present Microsoft Project (MP)plans to me it’s too easy to get buried in the weeds and forget stepping back to see the bigger picture.

As for the reporting features of MP, I think that 90%+ of the people out there either have never used the features or have never used them. I can’t say that I know how to use them offhand.

In defense of MP, however, the tool does provide a structure framework for analyzing projects (in terms of dependencies and loading). For some type of projects it may be critical (e.g., software development). That said, it’s so easy to go overboard with the project modeling and workbreakdown structure decomposition.