Chapter 14. Tracking Progress

After you finish planning a project and get approval from everyone necessary, you save a baseline of the project and give the signal for work to begin. You may be tempted to sit back at this point and rest on your…ahem…laurels. The hardest part of your job as project manager is done, right?

Wrong. Now that you've stepped over the threshold from planning into execution, plenty of challenges await. The execution phase is when you really earn your salt as a project manager: You monitor progress, evaluate performance, make adjustments as necessary, and manage the changes inevitable in projects.