Variance plays a key role in tracking project progress. These metrics can tell you whether a project is ahead, behind, under budget, or over budget. However, beyond the numbers, variance can reveal more about the project’s overall health.
What do you think variance can reveal about the overall health of a project, beyond just indicating whether it's ahead or behind? How might variances in early phases of a project predict long-term challenges? In your experience, how should project managers interpret and respond to these signals to improve project performance?
Variance does give us insight into whether a project is ahead or behind schedule, but it can also serve as a signal for deeper issues. For instance, consistent variances in the early stages could suggest problems with initial estimates and resource allocation or gaps in communication. These early warning signs can point to long-term challenges, like scope creep or delays, if not addressed.
While I don't really have any direct experience with this, I think it would be good to look beyond just correcting the numbers and ask why the variance is happening. Is there a recurring issue with certain tasks or teams? Are requirements not fully understood? By identifying the root cause, PMs can make adjustments that help improve project performance and prevent similar issues down the line. So, variance isn’t just about where the project stands at this moment, it’s also a predictor of where things might go if corrective actions aren’t taken.
Variance can definitely be a problem of poor estimation, but it can also reflect the health of a project in terms of its human and organizational aspects. If there are consistent schedule variances early on in a project, it may not just be an issue with estimating. Still, it could also mean that the team working on the project is overloaded, understaffed, or potentially lacking the right expertise. This would be very useful to project managers and corporations, as allowing such a team to continue would likely lead to longitudinal strain, which ultimately lowers morale and productivity, and may even further delay the team's progress on their tasks/project.
Variance also highlights risk exposure. If costs are increasing at an early stage, it may indicate that identified risks are manifesting earlier or that new, unaccounted-for risks are present. In regulated industries, this can quickly develop and lead to project failure or completion contingent upon immediate budget adjustments. Furthermore, early budget variances, whether they are attributed to additional testing or documentation, could foreshadow compliance problems later on. Thus, variance is more than just a mathematical tool; it's a diagnostic tool. Evaluating variance can help project managers identify whether a project is experiencing process weaknesses, resource mismatches, or risk events.
In terms of interpreting/dealing with variance, would it be better for project managers to focus on correcting individual variances as they happen, or to step back and analyze trends longitudinally in an effort to improve project resilience?
