Lesson 6: Managing Your Project: Part 2
Step 8: Work Completeness Check
As James P. Lewis guides us still, this step extends smoothly from our recent discussion of project monitoring, because in the work completeness check step the project team will verify that the work that was targeted to be achieved is, in fact, being done.
This sounds much, much easier than it is, and I feel truly awful for not finding a more complicated way to explain this. Promise me that you will throw in some nice three or four syllable words if you are ever called upon to explain this step, would you?
Checking the completeness of work is vitally important because there will be instances where work:
- Won’t be completed, in whole or in part.
- Will be completed incorrectly.
- Will be completed but in the process cause something else to be incomplete.
- Will be completed but will create another thing that needs completion that nobody expected because it isn’t in the work schedule.
- (add your own variation of the above here)
I don’t want to frighten you, nor convey that Project Management is soooooo astonishingly complicated that just checking to see if work is complete is so challenging.
I just want to convey the basic reality that checking to see if work is done is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance. And that's why it deserves its own step in our (and Lewis') methodology.
Don’t expect perfection from your project, and if you run into a situation where you have a widget but no notch, don’t blow up or anything, that is just part of the job. But you can mitigate these potential sad moments, and at the same time enlarge the possibility that you will have happy complete moments, by checking to see if work is done on an ongoing basis.
References used in this section (these books are available for order via the Resources link above):
The Project Manager’s Desk Reference, by James P. Lewis. Chapter 2; Chapter 11.
