 "Your Online PR and Free Content Source" Submit Your Articles, Press Releases, Books/Ebooks, Get Free Content. Log In 1-Minute Video: How This Site Works |
Are you sick of barely making ends meet? Isn't it time abundance started flowing effortlessly into your life? You too can have multiple streams of income streaming daily into your bank accounts by raising your abundance quotient! Here's how! 
|
|
Steering Committee Presentations
|
A good source of information for your presentation will be your weekly project status report, or project dashboard. This should contain all the information you need to drawn on for your presentation and should be familiar to some of the committee, providing you communicate the status report to everyone on the committee. You just need to take the information in the report and distill it into a presentation that is suitable for your Steering Committee. You will have to start from scratch if you don't have the weekly status report, or project dashboard, to work with. A simple guideline for determining which color to use to represent your project: Let's start with the performance to schedule indicator. The most commonly used indicator is the SPI (Schedule Performance Indicator), or some variation on it. This indicator is an Earned Value Management (EVM) formula and is covered in the PMBOK® Guide, 4th Edition. The formula can be stated in several ways but the one I find the easiest to understand is: amount of work actually done/amount of work planned. The amount of work can be stated in many ways, the only hard and fast rule is that the same measure must be used for amount of work actually done and the amount of work planned. The simplest form of measure is a unit of time: man hours, man days, man weeks, etc., although you can actually use a monetary measure. The result of this formula is a number calculated to 1 or 2 decimal places. An SPI of exactly 1.0 means that all the work planned was done, with no extra work being done. It means that the project is on track. An SPI of greater than 1.0 means that more work was actually done than was planned so the project is ahead of schedule. An SPI of less than 1.0 means that less work was actually done than was planned and the project is behind schedule. The project trend will be of as much interest as the SPI for the current reporting period so use a chart or graph to display a rolling window of SPIs. I prefer a bar chart myself, but you can use a linear graph as well. Make certain that you make the bar representing the SPI for your last presentation stand out, if you are using a chart from a weekly status report for your presentation, so that the Steering Committee can see the trend for the period covered by the current presentation. You may also want to include a trend line to obviate the trend. I would definitely include a line on the 1.0 axis to clearly show the baseline. Be sure to include any corrective actions you have implemented, or will implement, when the SPI is less than 1.0. You may have agreed upon a variance threshold for the project and will only implement corrective actions when the variance is greater than the threshold. If that's the case, be sure to include the threshold in your chart or graph, along with the "on track" or 1.0 line. You should describe the corrective action in a sentence or two when you have implemented, or will implement, one. Be certain to communicate the action to your executive sponsor in advance of presenting it to the Steering Committee. You may also wish to include a sentence assessing your perception of the effectiveness of the measure. Performance to budget is a much trickier metric to represent. It should be a fairly simple matter to extract schedule information from your project tracking tool (MS Project, Primavera, etc.) but typically, these tools are not used to track budget. If your Steering Committee wants this information, there are several different ways of getting at the information you need. You can use your scheduling tool to report this information, if you capture all expenditures in the tool. Enter each non-labor related expenditure as a deliverable and then enter a number of hours and hourly rate so that when the money is spent the deliverable is marked as 100 percent complete. When you are dealing with a services vendor who you will be making multiple payments to, enter a deliverable for each payment, with the appropriate number of hours and hourly rate to equal the payment amounts. Enter the loaded labor rate for the various groups of resources on the project. The formula used for performance to budget is the amount of money the project planned to spend to date, and the amount of money actually spent. The amount of money actually spent is simply the hours of work completed times the loaded labor rate for the work. You will have to perform this calculation for each different resource category and sum these totals if your tracking tools don't do this for you. Report the C
Large projects, or projects that are of strategic importance to the sponsoring organization, will frequently be overseen by a Steering Committee. These Steering Committees will be composed of the project's executive sponsor and other senior executives of the organization, and will need to be updated on the progress of the project. This article contains some tips and tricks for providing the Steering Committee with the information they want, in the form they want it in. Using these tips and tricks should make your presentations run more smoothly and generate some positive traction for your project among the executives on the committee. What to Present
Present factual information about the current status of the project. The executives on the committee are busy people who manage their individual organizations at the strategic level and they don't have a lot of time to spend learning the details of the project, so don't try to force feed them detailed information. As a rule of thumb, you should not present them with more project detail than they are used to seeing in presentations on their own businesses. Overall Project Progress
The key question your audience will want answered by your presentation is: "Is the project on track?" The first slide or group of slides, in your presentation ought to answer this question. You may want to use a color scheme: green, yellow, and red to indicate overall project health with green indicating healthy, yellow indicating minor deviation to plan, and red indicating major deviation. You can use a number of different visual aids to depict the color, for example you could use a traffic light so long as the key color stands out from the rest.
Even if you are reporting an overall project status of green or yellow, you may want to review the status with the executive sponsor to ensure that they are comfortable with the status. Project Progress to Schedule and Budget
There are 2 key indicators of a project's performance available to the project manager: performance to schedule and performance to budget. You may choose to include both these indicators in your report, but if you only choose one, make it performance to schedule. Performance to budget is a great indicator, but can be contentious information unless your audience is familiar with the way in which the project tracks this information, or the data you are using for your report is consistent with the finance department's view of the project.
Dave Nielsen is a project manager with over 20 years experience leading successful projects. He's also the founder and principal partner in three O Project Solutions, a project management training company and the vendors of AceIt (http://threeo.ca)
Contact the Author
|
Keywords: Presentations, Reports, Steering Committees, project management
This article has been viewed 317 time(s).
Does this article infringe on your copyright?
IdeaMarketers.com
It is a violation of our terms and conditions for writers to submit material which they did not write and claim it as their own.
If this article infringes on your copyrights, you MUST either call us at 706-866-2295 or send proof of infringement
along with the offending article's title, URL, and writer name to
Attn: Marnie Pehrson - Copyright Concern
514 Old Hickory Ln
Ringgold GA 30736 USA
If you email us or use our problem submission form, we CANNOT guarantee we'll receive your notice!
|
SheLovesGod
| Books
| Create A WOW
| I Am Joyful
| SyndicatedWriters |
ReadyToPublish |
EzineBuilder |
Good News |
LocateACoach
|
|
Media Room -
For Writers -
Writer Signup -
Get Content -
Info Desk -
About
IdeaMarketers is a Project of Pehrson Web Group |
Please Note: IdeaMarketers is a free-forum where
anyone may sign up for a free writer account or publisher account and post. It is always up to the
discretion of the visitor to decide about anything mentioned on the service. We do not personally
endorse any company, person, product or service listed on our site unless we explicitly say we are endorsing them.
Cutting edge articles
and exclusive audio interviews with experts like Kathleen Gage, Janis Pettit,
Denise Wakeman, Marnie Pehrson, Ellen Britt, Adam Urbanski, Nancy Marmolejo,
Milana Leshinsky, Michele PW & More!
