Essentially, I would maintain that in these scenarios (see Evidence and Project Management (01)), project managers are making "claims", some even "vague claims", about the state of their project.

That vague claim is made in the spirit of getting the boss off your back or in the knowledge (perhaps mis-directed) that by the time anyone checks ... the project will be where they have reported it to be anyway! It is done with good intentions.

But this isn't good enough because if work and direction in a project is determined by hearsay and not facts, no wonder many projects go off the track. I use a navigation metaphor to explain the possibilities. If you are say two degrees out in your direction, at 100 metres this equates to being about three metres out from your destination. But that same two degrees out means that at one kilometre, you are around 35 metres out. The message is that if your progress reporting is inaccurate, continuing to live the lie into the future could create huge problems down the track. The further you have to travel, the further from your goal you can potentially become and perhaps the more corrections you have to make and the larger those corrections might be.

To illustrate just how large the error can be, have a look at this story where in Australia in 1862 Queensland robbed the Northern Territory of quite a bit of land due to a very small error over a long distance.

I have seen many times over, where projects have reported everything going fine and on schedule, only for that to come undone in the future where it is suddenly found the status has gone from green to red in a very short period. Little or no warning, no real action taken to rectify the situation in the past, just bang!! ....things have turned to junkie custard.

That's because the project staff were able to write a story about how they believed the project was progressing. The facts weren't presented and little or no evidence was sought. The project manager was taken at his or her word. This doesn't mean that all the project managers were being less than honest or perhaps have so little real knowledge of their project they didn't see the problem coming.

What I really see when this is happening is that the information flow is one way. The project manager passes their information upstream as to how they see their project going. The executives or program manager queries the project manager around that story not around the facts, but around the facts as presented by the project manager.

But the process should be a two way one:

• The project manager gathers the facts from the project and queries the staff about progress and issues around those facts.
• The executive reaches down into the project and also pulls the facts from it independently of the project manager.
• The project manager and the executive then discuss the facts as they have seen them and the implications those facts might have.

Why would this work? I think one reason would be that it is much harder to fabricate and tamper with evidence than it is to make vague claims about your project's progress. Fabrication is also a step way too far for most whereas making a vague claim doesn't quite have the same stigma.