Project Monitoring and Data Integrity

Organizations use the results of the project monitoring systems to inform all manner of decisions, including allocating resources, budgets, and strategic selection of future projects. Despite being studied for decades, project monitoring still is more of an art than a science, and if left unchecked, the results can be a culmination of guess work. This chapter uses software development to illustrate challenges in documenting project progress when progress is not visible. Status reporting is often left to those working on the project but are not aware of the significance of quality inputs. These data inputs may not be accurate, and as the foundation of the project monitoring system, may lead to erroneous project monitoring system. To solve this data integrity problem, this chapter proposing adding the role of ‘monitoring’ to the Change Control Board.