When a fueled rocket departs for a distant destination, a course correction of a degree or two can be made early on with little cost in fuel and little impact on its schedule. If the rocket continues a few degrees off course for half its scheduled travel time, it may not have enough fuel to correct it's course and return back in line to arrive at its destination. If it had an overabundance of fuel and implemented the course correction, it would arrive significantly late.

Substitute "project" for "rocket" and "money" for "fuel". It's is no surprise then that projects that go too long uncorrected experience significant cost and schedule overruns, and that some projects get canceled altogether.

Steve McConnell
CEO and Chief Software Engineer, Construx
Author and Lecturer

Project Oversight

Another word for project tracking is "visibility"— insight into the project’s progress and status. Most project status reporting report's what's already done and what is currently being done, usually using someone's estimate as to the percentage of completion. That's not enough information to guage what lies ahead for the project.

You wouldn't get much prediction on a driving trip if you looked only out the rear and side windows. You'd have to look out the front window to see what's coming up. And you'd have to look at a detailed map, not just a large-scale map, to see your exact location on the current portion of the trip.

Most project reporting doesn't provide a "front window" view of the project. It doesn't provide a detailed enough look at the full scope of current activities to provide an accurate status on current tasks. Project get late, people work harder, but the basic project plan doesn't change. As the customer, you can't really find out enough about what's going on to fix things.

The business nature of projects means that the vendor is looking out for the vendor's interests first and the customer's interests second. So if you are the customer, who's looking out for you? Unless the in-house person you have dedicated to the project has lots of project experience, and at least some of it on the vendor's side of projects, he won't have enough familiarity with the scene to recognize the true project status and initiate preventive or remedial measures.

Just like a radio weather report can alert you to coming storms before you can seem them out the window, project oversight by an experience third party can provide you with true visibility into your vendor projects, and act like an early warning radar.

We've never seen a security project that was not important enough to track accurately and keep on-schedule and in-budget. That's what project oversight is for.

To find out more about how RBCS can provide project oversight for your security projects, call us today at 949-831-6788!