Follow-up items
Being involved in doing the project work gives us a better chance of discovering follow-up items than abstract upfront planning does, and we shouldn’t miss this opportunity. Follow-up item is a P3.express term that refers to any of the following:
- Risks: Have you discovered any uncertainties for the future that may impact the project? Most Agile projects have daily stand-up meetings, where all team members get together for 15 to 20 minutes and each person answers three questions: What have I been doing since yesterday? What am I going to do today? What problems might I have? The last question is a simple way of identifying new risks in the near future. In projects that are not too small, you may not have the chance to have daily meetings like that, but you can still have a customized version of it that suits your projects.
- Issues: How about unplanned things that actually happened? You need to do something about them.
- Improvement plans: It’s a great idea to have frequent activities for evaluating stakeholder satisfaction and using that, alongside other inputted data to see how you can work better in the future.
- Change requests: Does the customer or another stakeholder have a change request? If so, first, we should assess the impact of the change on time, cost, quality, and other targets, and then prepare one or more proposals for how we can add it to the project. The requester can review the proposals and select one. Change is not a bad thing; it’s only bad when you don’t manage it in an integrated way.
- Lessons learned: Everything we do in the project can be used later as a lesson, with various levels of usefulness. It’s great to keep this information and make it available to future projects.
It doesn’t matter how simple and small your project is, it’s always best to document all these items as soon as they are discovered, because otherwise they will consume more mental energy and there will also be the risk of forgetting them. After documenting them, you must make sure they are followed up on until they are closed.
P3.express uses a single artifact called the follow-up register to store every type of follow-up item, and it also has the rule that any follow-up item as well as every deliverable should have a custodian to continuously check it, make sure the related plans are being implemented, and report on it.
So, you should make sure your methodology covers all of these items, either with a minimalist approach like that of P3.express or in a more sophisticated form with multiple artifacts and processes, such as PRINCE2®’s.