Question:  What is consuming 30% of your time that isn't even being tracked in your project management software?

I know you are probably thinking this is related to planning.  People are always telling me how important project planning is ( and I don't disagree with them).  Many top organizations spend a reasonable amount of time studying workplans, building methodologies, and standardizing on planning templates.  Yet they report they are still regularly running over budget on their IT projects and can't figure out why? 

The issue is issue management.

If every project in a company was fully understood and planned accordingly then we should be able to predict when (within a small margin) that project would complete.  We would know when resources were needed, resources would become available, and would have a clear picture of project delivery.  All would be perfect.

Yet we know it is far from perfect.  Even well planned and predictable IT projects regularly overrun costs, schedules, and resources.  Why?  It is a lack of effective issue management that prevents the projects from completing per plan.  These issues offshoot from the risks on the project and generate change requests, further complicating the project and are almost universally un-tracked in project management software.

I know what your thinking, "our super uber project management system does have issue management - doesn't it?". 

Does it?  Can your process and your software support effective issue management and allow your teams to:

• Plan the resolution of an issue and staff it just like you would a deliverable or task?
• Set an estimate to complete for each assignment and track it to actual timesheet entries?
• Easily collaborate back and forth on the issue in the comments?
• Attach documents to the issue?
• Escalate the issue and have the system email the sponsor?
• Search all past issues (knowledge management)?
• Track metrics on average issue resolution time over months to see PMO improvements in issue management?
• Quickly pull all issues by responsible organization or by client?

Having profiled thousands of online PM software accounts has shown that issue management represents 30% of the average total time spent on projects.  If you are not tracking issues and changes separately on your timesheet this time is most likely getting pushed against various elements of your plan.  This makes continuous process improvement impossible and provides an inadequate view of the project performance.

Organizations need to track and manage how well the team operated against the original plan and know how much time was spent dealing with issues (by type) as well as change requests.  You might find that without issues your team operated exactly as planned but the issues and change requests between customers, stakeholders, suppliers, and partners prevented the project from completing on time.

"So can't we just type in issues into our task plan?"  Yes and no.  You don't want to force issues into your task plan unless you can easily filter them out in reporting and analysis.  You need to know the team utilization on various activities and performance against them.  I recommend you find a better PM solution or track issues in a separate "sub-project" plan so you can easily see the difference between issue time and planned time.

By using the same rigor and reporting for issue management as many organizations use for task and deliverable management you will have a much better insight into the types of issues and the times of resolution that are driving up costs and timelines.  Furthermore, you will have a knowledge management system that can be utilized by future project managers that experience similar issues and thus can drive down their issue resolution times as well.

What are your stories of working with issues and the struggle to get issue management to the forefront of your PMOs?  I would love to hear from you below!

Virtually yours,
Nick Matteucci, MBA

Author: Nick Matteucci is a co-founder of VCSonline.com a web 2.0 project management software company headquartered in St. Louis Missouri. Mr. Matteucci is also an active board member and the Chief Technology Officer for the PMI ISSIG. When not obsessing over virtual project management best practices Mr. Matteucci enjoys spending time with his wife and three small children. He also enjoys travel, running, and all things automotive.

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