The Project Management Mystique Unveiled 135 ess--part of your monitoring and controlling process. Decisions are made as to which changes to the project plan should be accepted. These decisions become inputs back into your common executing and planning processes. These feedback loops between monitoring and controlling, plan- ning, and executing will continue during your project. Ideally, this happens through a combination of subjective observation and evalu- ating hard project data. Here are some key points for review: . Planning, executing, and monitoring and controlling all work hand in hand, often subtly. It is important to recognize these different processes and manage them accordingly. . Planning outputs are always inputs to both the executing and the monitoring and controlling processes. . The main outputs of monitoring and controlling processes are deci- sions on how to respond to your variances and resulting actions. These decisions and actions are inputs back into planning and exe- cuting. . Determining whether deliverables have the needed features and functionality and deciding whether to accept them are part of the monitoring and controlling process. . Determining whether deliverables meet the desired quality stan- dard is also a monitoring and controlling process. However, it is different from verifying features and functionality, which are related to project scope. For practical purposes, the customer team will treat these evaluations as one and the same, but you must under- stand whether you are dealing with a scope issue or a quality issue when determining corrective courses of action. Demystifying Methodologies Many confusing terms and phrases are rooted in the various methodologies adopted by organizations. These include project management methodologies and system or software development American Managememt Association · www.amanet.org