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Project Management > How to manage a small project > Take Corrective Action Promptly
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11. Take Corrective Action Promptly
Take corrective action whenever the project goes off track. Prompt and decisive action is the best way to bring the project back on track in terms of cost, schedule and delivery quality.   ake corrective action promptly to head off adverse
impact. If your status reports indicate schedule slippage, cost
overrun, quality problems or scope creep, you'll want to take prompt action to curb the problems and get
things back on track. There are a number of things you can do, when managing small projects,
to correct various types of issues. Naturally, the action you take will depend on the type of
issue you want to correct. Compensate for tasks that are taking too long. You can speed up a task by adding a resource, by working additional overtime hours, or by replacing a resource with one that performs faster. There is often a cost tradeoff when you add a resource. Additional resources or overtime will cost more, and a more skilled or higher-powered resource may come at an increased rate. If the task is not on the critical path or if it has no dependencies, it may not be necessary to take corrective action, especially if it looks like the task will eventually complete satisfactorily. But if the task has dependencies or will cause the project to slip, you will need to take action quickly. Compensate for tasks costing too much. If a purchased or fixed fee item has been impacted by a price increase, often the best thing to do is to adjust the overall cost plan for the project, rather than trying to compensate. Otherwise, you can look for cost tradeoffs elsewhere, like using cheaper purchased items, lower cost resources and so on. Sometimes there are conflicts between trying to compensate for cost and schedule impacts. That's where your decision-making skills come in. You'll have to make a tradeoff and rely on your knowledge of the management climate and the goals and requirements of the project.Check on skills and obstacles in tasks not completing or finishing fast enough. When all the hours allocated to a task are gone, but the task is not yet finished, it indicates a problem. But a better time to catch the problem might be when 25% of the hours are used, but the task is not 25% completed. That's when you still have an opportunity to take corrective action. Prompt reporting can help, but you'll need to pay close attention to tasks that are shorter than your reporting cycle. If you have a daily or weekly reporting cycle, it's possible for a two-day task to double and go unreported until it's too late. Correct issues where unscheduled tasks are being worked. You can avoid this, for the most part, by advising your team to notify you when out-of-scope requests are received. This type of activity always occurs at the request of someone, most often a stakeholder. You can head off these issues by having a change request and approval process, and advising the requester and approvers of the impact on the project's cost and schedule. If the change is approved, you simply recalculate the project to accommodate it and keep track of it. Correct Inadequate Tasks and Deliverables. The most difficult problem to deal with is the one where the task is completed and materials are ready for delivery, but they just don't meet requirements. This shouldn't happen in a well-documented project, but it does -- often because resources just don't read the project documentation. The only solution is rework. Rework is costly and can be prevented by incorporating inspection points during the development of a deliverable. Incorporating a quality control process into the project itself should prevent this type of problem especially if you inspect the deliverable as it is being produced instead of waiting until it is being delivered. Closely monitoring the status of tasks and the quality of deliverables can often eliminate the need for taking corrective action. - Jake Alexander Next in the series: Report Project Status
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