For a good project manager, the delivery stage of your project, it was time to put your feet up and relax. Because you've done the hard work, you might define what the project is. You put together a detailed specification and design for the outputs. you've planned how you're going to deliver it, and he made the case. Now your team can get on and do the delivering. And you can relax with a cup of tea or a cup of coffee.

Only were quite that simple. But actually, there are only three fundamental things you need to be doing during the delivery stage. So we're going to have a look at that. So what do we know? Well, let's start off with that. What we know is that you put together a plan, you deliver against that Plan and there's a big milestone at the end.

And that big milestone is where you hand over. So covered that so far in this video course. Your first responsibility during delivery stage is to keep an eye on everything. We monitor, both formally and informally. Formally, we're keeping an eye on expenditure against budget, on delivery against schedule, on the quality of the deliverables that are being produced, the drawdown of consumable resources, the activities of our people. We're looking at the risks and the issues and managing those actively, informally.

We're talking to team members with maintaining their morale. We're giving praise and recognition for good work. We're giving guidance and support where people get stuck. We're taking the temperature of the moon to make sure that people remaining highly motivated whether or not we do something about it. Fundamentally though, we monitor because shift happens, things go wrong. And when things go wrong, we need to exert control, we need to intervene to bring the project back on schedule back on budget, back on resource profile, or whatever.

And that loop goes from delivery to monitor to control to delivery is called the monitoring control cycle or the monitor and control loop. And the most fundamental thing to know about the delivery stage of a project is the word rhythm. Because projects have a rhythm. As you're watching this, you can probably in your mind, infantry experiences, you've had different projects with different rhythms. You may have been involved in a project where nothing much happens from one week to the next. You may have been involved in projects where Things seem to happen pretty much every day.

And by the end of the week, there's been substantial progress. And you may have been involved in projects where every day, when you leave the office, or you leave the factory or the warehouse, huge amounts of change happened, and there is constant change. And if you pop out for an hour, you're going to miss stuff. That's the rhythm of the project. And if, as a project manager, you do not go around that monitoring control loop fast enough for the rhythm, then by the time you spot a problem, it will already be a large problem. Therefore, your control intervention needs to be substantial.

With the consequent risk that you overdo it or under do it, but you won't find out for a while because you're going around the cycle too slowly. And consequently what then happens is the project starts to spiral out of control. On the other hand, if you go around the monitor and control loop fast enough faster than the character ristic pace of your project, then you will spot problems while they're still small. So you can have a subtle little tweak a small intervention here or there and check very quickly whether it's been effective and tweak it further if you need to have that how you stay in control. That's the project heartbeat. Course.

That's not the only thing. Because sometimes whether you plan well or not, sometimes you do miss something fundamentally in the planning or something happens that is wholly unexpected, and no amount of going round around in circles, is actually going to get you out of trouble. When in a hole. stop digging. If going around and once from the troll loop is not restoring you back to schedule is not restoring you back to budget, you need to stop replan. Think about what's happened.

You are where you need to get to check that your still is appropriate to get to where you were originally going, and then come up with a new plan. Because if your plan is so far out of date, then it's no guide whatsoever to what you're doing. So you will use less time by stopping large chunks of the project of which you're not totally certain, and diverting those people onto replanting, then you would lose if you just keep going around circles. So that's the monitoring control loop and the replan cycle. Taking care of that one line, one of the three things. The second is reporting.

Project managers, by and large are people of action. We are like sitting down and writing report, but we know we have to. We know the importance and the value of communication both to our superiors, to our clients and bosses, but also to our stakeholders and our teams. And we also need to report because of the gap It's imperative to be accountable and transparent about what we've done. We need to put stuff on the record, create an audit trail, because we're spending other people's money. But there's another reason for reporting.

And as a project manager who doesn't like writing reports, which I know is ironic, someone has written 13 books and a fair number of ebooks as well. But I never enjoyed writing a report. I never even enjoyed supervising the report writing process in itself. So for me, what's the importance of report personally? Well, as a project manager, my job is to keep control of my project. And you know what, sometimes things happen and I don't have the wisdom to know what to do.

Sometimes things happen, I don't have the authority to access the resources that I need to do what I know I need to do. Sometimes, I don't have the seniority to make the decisions that I need to make So I write reports to get those decisions made to access those reports. And to tap into that wisdom of people who have been around longer have more seniority than me. And that allows me to do what I need to do, which is to control my project. During a project, there are two forms of reports. And we'll look at those in a separate video.

The third thing that we need to be doing during a project arises out of the sort of thing that happens when your projects going well. Because soon as your projects going, Well, you know, something's gonna happen, and will typically happen to someone or wander up to you and they'll say, oh, Mike, congratulations, projects go really well. We're very, very happy. The only thing is, we've kind of changed our minds. We want to change that is what is known in the jargon as a request for change or a change request. As a project manager, if you are temperamentally suited to being a project manager, almost certainly, your first instinct was to say, Yeah, fine, leave it with me.

Because we're that kind of just do it people from where that is. Where's the resources? Where's the budget? Where's the time to do this extra thing? And indeed, where's the authority person who asked you might be right, they might be wrong. But what if they don't have the authority?

And what if they are wrong? Perhaps the safer thing to say is No. Sorry, we can't do that. We've agreed the scope. We've agreed the objectives. We've agreed the plan.

We've agreed the specifications. It's all been signed off. We're sticking to what we said. We said we do. Follow that is the real world changes, commercial environment changes, regulatory environment changes, new technology offers up new opportunities. Maybe there's a compelling reason why we should make this change.

Maybe there's a commercial benefit in making this change. Maybe the person who's asking for it can pull rank and ruin your life if you say no to. So what's the right answer? Well, as a project manager, what you crave above all else, of course, is control. So you need a change control process. And it starts by responding to that request for change with a very simple answer.

Thank you. Thank you for your request for change. Please do two things for me. And what I need the proposer to do is firstly document precisely the changes the sheet or he wants. No one is better to do that than they are. And secondly, they're probably also the best person to gather together the evidence to justify making those changes.

What are the benefits or what are the compelling drivers that mean we have to make these changes? Once I've got that contribution, I can then look at the implications of those changes for the project. What will it do? To our budget, what resources will we need? What will it do to our risk profile? What will it do to our schedule?

What impact will it have on other projects or activities that I'm aware of? And only when I've got the two sides of these arguments to weigh up? Can I take them to my boss, to my client to the properly appointed decision maker for a decision? If they say, Yes, we like that proposition. It's justified. It's needed or whatever, then I've already done my planning.

It's just a drop off, I go and deliver that change. If on the other hand, too expensive, the risks too great. The effects on the schedule is too great. There's not enough benefit. The answer's no. The proposal course is going to be a bit miserable, but at least they know that I've followed a process of due diligence and good practice.

It's all been transparent and open. I've got a record. And indeed, I will keep a change register. change log, documenting every request, who it's come from when it came, who assessed it, when it was assessed what the decision was what was done about it and crucially for my audit trail, how much it cost and what it did to the schedule. So when the auditors come knocking on my door, and saying, why is this project six months late, and 500,000 pounds over budget, I can say, well, this change was approved by these people and it added an extra hundred thousand pounds to the project and an extra six weeks. This change, added an extra 300,000 pounds an extra two weeks and so on.

That audit trail not only gives me control, but it gives me transparency and accountability. So during delivery phase, three very important cycles, the monitoring, controlling the reporting cycle and the change control process. Most of those and you will master the delivery stage.