How do you know if the project you are sponsoring is progressing towards the set goal or drifting aimlessly?
Consider you are sponsoring an ERP upgrade project. The project team suggested ten additional requests (gaps) during the execution. The team also proposed to implement an advanced Inventory module.
As a Project Sponsor, how do you know if your project is progressing towards the set goal or drifting?
To answer the above question, you need to know – what is the project’s goal? What is the set goal of the project?
Now consider the following Project objective:
The project’s primary purpose is to have a like for like ERP upgrade. The process improvements and additional features will be delivered in the subsequent phases of the project.
Suppose we validate the above requests against the Project objective. In that case, we can observe that we should not simply accept the team recommendations. Instead, we may want to do additional work to investigate the value of the proposed changes.
The key is that we must have a baseline. In this case, our baseline is the Project Objective. This is our starting point against which we measure our progress.
