Call them performance periods, segments, or anything you choose …as long as you determine a time frame in which activities will get done. Companies have quarterly reports every three months to assess how well they are doing financially. Projects need the same type of breakdown. This allows you to analyze and review the project through each period. It also gives you time to review the intended goals of the overall project and discuss the upcoming phases with team members.

Performance periods will help you subdivide the overall task into more manageable segments. Select appropriate amounts of time. If your time periods are too short, there may not be enough progress to monitor. On the other hand, if monitoring occurs too infrequently, some aspect of the project can go wrong and be undetected before turning into a major problem.

Gathering Information

Once you've assessed what you'll be looking for and how often you'll be monitoring the project, you'll need to determine exactly what information needs to be gathered:

• When each activity began and ended

• The resources used for each activity

• The expenses incurred for each activity

• The number of man hours put into each activity

• Whether the goal of the activity was accomplished or not (this may determine whether you can move on to the next activity or task)

To make all of this information worthwhile, you need a measure of comparison. This is where you turn to your original plans. Did the start and end dates of the activity coincide with your projected start and end dates? Did you use the anticipated resources or did you run short or have materials left over? Where are you in conjunction with your projected budget at this point in the project? Did you anticipate more or fewer man hours to this point in the project?

All of the comparisons with your initial plan are vital to determining where you stand at any given time in the process. Compare the performance of your team with the original plan and look for reasons why there are differences. To better your understanding of the comparisons, you may want to meet with team members and get further details. In these meetings, you can discuss progress, assess any setbacks, resolve issues, and evaluate performance. Team members can often provide valuable suggestions on ways to perform more efficiently. Perhaps the resources are at fault for the delays.

Prior to meetings, you should study the details of your tracking or monitoring system to find the most glaring differences between scheduled and actual performance. If everything is running smoothly, you may simply want to tell everyone how well they are doing and keep up the team spirit by using the review meeting as an opportunity to reward everyone in a small way.

While you may not need as lengthy a discussion as you would if the project were off schedule, it's a good idea to get some notion of why things are going well. You will want to document what you are doing so that you can repeat your success on the next project. Just as people learn from their mistakes, they also learn from their successes. (And don't get too overconfident if the project is on course; things can always take a turn for the worse.)

More often than not, one area is lagging behind or one task is falling behind schedule. You need to assess why. Did you underestimate the time it would take to perform the task? Are you using improper resources? Is the right person doing the right task? Whatever the reason, you need to find the source of the problem, then you need to try to prevent that task from falling further behind schedule.