168 Project Management
organization to organization. On some projects, project control
documentation may be effectively managed through the use of
pencil and paper. Others may make use of sophisticated, com-
pany-wide, mainframe systems. The amount of software and
systems support you use for your projects will depend on vari-
ous factors, some of which we examined in Chapter 7, in dis-
cussing the amount of planning you should do:
- project complexity
- project size
- organizational expectations
- organizational support (i.e., what the organization pro-
vides for you)
Many project managers find themselves somewhere in the
middle of the continuum of software and systems support. They
use one of the many stand-alone software packages, most of
which have a respectable amount of processing capability, but
still require manual data entry.
How Do You Make Sure You’re Getting Good
Information?
To evaluate your position and maintain control, it’s not enough
to simply gather information. What you need is high-quality
information. But what does “high quality” mean? The informa-
tion you need should be:
In the appropriate form. This means that the information is
expressed in a way that allows you to process it with relative
ease. How do you ensure that you get information in a form that
you can use? First, make your expectations clear regarding the
way the information should be presented. Second, as mentioned
above, provide forms and templates that team members can
simply fill in.
Timely. Your ability to react to problems in a timely manner will
depend upon the “freshness” of the information you receive.
Since the most of that information will come in team meetings,
it follows that the frequency of team meetings is critical. As