Tactical Execution Best Practice 3 – Timely Reporting of Activity Status

Rarely does unique, creative, or exploratory work complete on-time and on-budget (accounting for personnel, material, and financial resources). Although planners make every effort to accurately predict task needs, the many variables and uncertainties associated with these types of tasks make highly accurate planning nearly impossible. Even highly repetitive tasks can suffer from unforeseeable circumstances that delay their performance or raise costs. Subsequently, buffers are often added to work plans to accommodate for the uncertainty. At times, these buffers aren’t enough. On other occasions, excess time and/or resources remain. Only through timely communication of activity status can managers proactively prioritize and adjust their operations or project plans to accommodate the unknown and recover excess time and resources.[wcm_restrict plans=”41016, 25542, 25653″]

The appropriate time to report an activity’s status or completion is seldom on its due date/time. Rather, the status of those activities that will likely finish late or over budget should be reported when the condition is recognized and in time to reasonably afford organization leaders the opportunity to apply additional resources to ensure at least on-time completion. Likewise, the status of activities likely to finish early should be reported as soon as possible so excess and newly available resources can be redeployed to the company’s optimal benefit.

Rules of Thumb for Activity Status Reporting Timeliness

Unique, Creative, or Exploratory Work – activities with high time and resource uncertainty

• Report time to completion instead of just percent finished
• Activities finishing late should be reported early enough that the next level manager can apply additional resources within his/her expenditure authorization limits to ensure an on-time completion
• Early finish projections should be made as soon reasonably possible. To accommodate uncertainty in early finish projections, managers should consider a phased rolling off of non-critical staff as a technique to better ensure on-time task completion is achieved
• Status report frequency should be directly related to the importance of the activity to be completed; the more important the more frequent the status reporting
• Activities involving multiple workgroups should be made more frequently and to all groups involved, especially those with follow-on work
• Project status meetings that include key project personnel are conducted on a periodic basis (daily, weekly, or monthly) depending on project intensity

Highly Repetitive, Well Understood Work – activities with high time and resource certainty
Employ all of the rules of thumb for unique, creative, or exploratory work with the following additions:

• For intense facility outages or other cost intensive work, implement a 15 minute standard where work expected to finish more than 15 minutes early or late are immediately reported with the work control organization
• For intense facility outages or other cost intensive work, implement a 15 or 30 minute status reporting standard for critical path and near critical path activities
• For intense facility outages or other cost intensive work, status report meetings including key managers and supervisors are conducted on at least once per work shift (typically at the beginning of the work shift) with consideration given to also conducting a mid-shift briefing. These briefings should in no way be construed to alleviate the aforementioned activity status reporting

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