There are many ways to check the overall health of your project, but how do you make sure that you’re actually being effective? In this video, Jennifer Bridges, PMP, explores three vital ways to keep your project healthy.

Here’s a shot of the whiteboard for your reference!

In Review:

In this video, Jennifer talked about the checks that you can apply on a day-to-day basis to ensure that your projects are progressing well.

• Have data-driven meetings: Accurate, reliable and real-time information helps with collaboration and establishing where you on the project;
• Use visual dashboards with customized views to show current status and to generate group feedback, and using a tablet in meetings can help with this; and
• Ask relevant questions to uncover roadblocks and assist your team.

Remember, as Jennifer said, in order to gain client confidence, retain team loyalty, reduce project variances and actually get things done, you want to keep a healthy project. These three effective ways will help you do that, and we hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about them.

Pro Tip: Project dashboards allow you to identify areas that need more project management oversight at-a-glance. Set up your dashboards to show the key metrics that you want to measure in relation to project health.

A healthy project is a reflection of a healthy team. In order to track the well-being of your resources check out Elizabeth Harrin’s article How to Monitor Your Team’s Health.

Thanks for watching!

Transcription

Hello everyone! Today’s Whiteboard Session is on “3 Ways to Check the Health of Your Project.”

So you may ask yourself, “Well, don’t I do that in my stand-up meetings or in my project reports?” Well, you may but we want to give you a few other things to think about.

Have Data-Driven Meetings

First of all, in order to gain client confidence, retain team loyalty, reduce project variances and actually get things done, you want to keep a healthy project. So we have found three effective ways that we want to share with you that will help you keep the health of your project.

So first of all, always have data-driven meetings. What’s data, right? It’s the time, the cost, the scope, the deliverables, the activities, any kind of action items, issues or risk on your project. You want to maintain those in a project management software and be able to provide those real-time. Bring accurate, reliable, and real-time data to your team. So, it actually helps to help with collaboration, spark discussions, give feedback on the truth of where you are in the project.

Use Visual Dashboards

Number two: use visual dashboards. It’s just a best practice, because we believe a picture’s worth a thousand words and saves a million meetings in project management. So, to be able to show visually the cost and any variances, the time, and scope, and any variances, and using a dashboard to show the true status.

You can simplify with customized views. For instance, your stakeholders may want a different view than your team members. The stakeholders want to see a high-level view of the health of the project – are you getting things done, is everything going to be on track for everything to meet their initiatives and goals? But your team may want to see more of the details of what work they need to get done, what deliverables that they need in order to complete their deliverables.

It also helps to generate group feedback. Again, if you’re providing visual data, it helps people say, “No. I don’t think that’s right. Oh yeah. Hey, by the way there’s a risk there of getting that on time.” And then also a cool thing now to do with technology is to bring in a tablet. You can bring a tablet to show those to the team when you’re doing your status meeting.

Ask Relevant Questions

The third one is to ask relevant questions. So when you’re in your status meeting and talking about things, you don’t want to be passive. You want to ask open-ended questions. For instance, if someone is providing a status you may want to ask, “Well, where should we be right now?” If you ask it open-ended they may say, “Well, we’re supposed to be complete right now, but we’re two weeks late.” Or they may indicate to you, “We need some more resources,” or may flag some kind of potential risk. Then you can also ask, “How can I help?”

As a project manager you are there to remove roadblocks. So if you ask how you can help, then they generally will let you know. So, it helps you to get a real status through feedback and uncover roadblocks with discussions.

So, we find these are very effective ways for you to check the health of your project. If you need a tool that can help you check the health of your project, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager.com.