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Recovering from deviations

Most methodologies have a decision-making process based on the impact of the deviations. If the impact of the deviations is lower than a certain level, the team members decide how to recover from them; if the impact is medium, the project manager decides, and if it’s higher, it will be escalated to higher levels to make the decision and tell the project team what to do.

Some people mistake the thresholds with whether or not a decision is required; for example, if a deviation is below a certain threshold, we don’t need to recover from it. That’s not what most methodologies such as PRINCE2® have in mind, though – The thresholds only determine who should decide about recovery, but recovery is always necessary because if we don’t do anything about deviations, they pile up and become harder to fix.

Next: Correction vs. prevention