Introduction

If you ve followed all the steps leading up to this chapter, congratulations! Your IT project should be sitting on very solid ground. Your planning activities will help everyone stay focused during the project work phase and will help make sure the scope, time, cost, and quality requirements are met. In this chapter, we re going to discuss strategies for managing your IT project. We ll talk about getting the project started and how to monitor and control project progress. We will cover more detailed, technical tracking techniques separately in Chapter 11 along with common project problems and solutions. Where appropriate, we ll mention some of the detailed tracking techniques in this chapter and refer you to Chapter 11 for more detail.

Managing your IT project is much easier when you have a clear vision of the project, developed from your efforts at defining, organizing, and planning your project. In this chapter, we ll look at how to supervise the project elements, including monitoring project progress, managing change and risk, and managing your project team.

As with previous chapters, we ll begin by taking a look at where we are in the process, shown in Figure 10.1. It is clear that up until now, no actual project work has been done (yes, planning is work, but not the actual work of the project). Though there are a lot of planning activities, they all contribute to your ability to manage your project during this implementation and work phase. As your project moves forward, you ll...