About

Welcome to THE PROJECT STATUS. THE PROJECT STATUS app is based on:

• many years of project experience in both software and organizational projects,
• hundreds of Excel sheets that have been filled or analysed in order to keep track with project statuses,
• the analysis of many project reports across the industry,
• current academic research and lectures,
• a significant conceptual understanding of both agile and waterfall project management methodologies,
• the psychology of the red traffic light,
• the review of what project status reports are used in the industry and in the literature
• advanced tree algorithms for managing intertwined vertical and horizontal trees.

This app has been programmed by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Anders, Professor of Strategic Management at the CBS International Business School in Cologne. Algorithmic support has been provided by Jasper Anders, B. Sc. in Business Engineering from KIT, Master Student of Business & Computer Science at KIT and previously part-time developer at Ambient Innovation.

Feel invited to use THE PROJECT STATUS app. I am happy to receive your feedback. You can send it to: prof.anders@online.de.

Why

Many projects fail in the sense of the definition that they are delivered late, over budget or with a lesser scope and quality then planned or promised.

Projects are typically complex, technically or organizationally, and involve a lot of stakeholders that may politically or with their power influence the project.

Managing this complexity needs instruments. The amount of textbooks and articles on project management is vast. In contrast, the amount of textbooks and articles on project control is tiny. At best this discipline is covered in maximum one chapter of the project management books. Project control seems to be the forgotten discipline.

As a further result no gold standard has developed for good project status reporting that helps the project manager and the persons involved in the project to keep the overview of the project. Even across the most prominent project software tools, the approach to project control is widely different. Some tools do not offer regular project status reporting at all, others leave the user alone to construct some project reporting and again others offer status reports that are difficult to understand or read.

Some remedy for the lack of transparency has been achieved through agile Kanban boards and daily stand-ups but the transparency achieved through this approach basically only helps the people who stand in front of the board. If no further reporting is constructed Kanban boards do not bring the necessary transparency to managers, customers and stakeholders surrounding the core team.

In order to understand what the criteria for good project status reports are, I have developed the 10 Commandments of Project Control. This app is based on these 10 Commandments. With an app I hope to contribute to the research in this field beyond an academic research paper. In order to stand its test in reality, I have tried to make THE PROJECT STATUS app as convenient to use as possible.

Academics, researchers and practitioners are invited to use THE PROJECT STATUS, try it out and give feedback. Thank you.

For Whom

Currently THE PROJECT STATUS app is on VERSION 0.17.6.alpha for testing and final development. Once the development is completed and we reach VERSION 1.0.0 the app will be offered for free:

• to Universities, academics, lectures and students: I feel that project control is an underrepresented discipline and hope to contribute with this app to the education in this field. I am also convinced that better project status reporting will significantly improve the success rates of projects because project status reporting adds transparency to a project and enforces a delivery and quality focus. If you are interested in cooperation on further research, please get in contact.

• to companies: Still, many companies use Spreadsheet solutions at large. Spreadsheet solutions suffer from many obvious disadvantages. If you consider this app useful for your company, please get in contact for a potential cooperation or further development.

Please contact me under: prof.anders@online.de.

Thanks

A number of people provided help, suggestions or bug reports. To them I would like to extend my thanks.

• To Jasper Anders who wrote the quite demanding and difficult intertwined tree algorithms of the app. He also added many of the functions that combine the front-end with the intelligence and underlying logic of the app. During the MVP-phase, he has been an excellent discussion partner for the overall design concept and the behavior of THE PROJECT STATUS.

• To my students in the early MVP-stage of the app: Matthias Hegger, Emir Piraj, Emil Sømme, Justin Kumar.

The Author