I'm a Control Freak!!

When you start a new project, you can simply start the project, don't have a care in the world.....whistle your favourite tune....and get on with the project. When things go wrong, when your clients gather all the data they should have done, when a few users are still logged on to that server you're decommisioning, or when you've spent too much....you can simply.....just...continue....

OR.....

You can monitor and control what's happening. Your controls are the documents you use to track whats happening in the project. A simple control would be a project plan. Most people including moi, use a gantt chart for this. If you want to be extra proper....you could go out and by super expensive copy of Microsoft Project. To be honest though....its a waste of time. Just use Excel or if you havent got that use google docs and use the spreadsheet program. Using this, have one column as your task name column and another as your start and end date columns. Dead simple. No messing about.

In addition to that you could have another column called 'duration' and then another column called 'actual duration'. Using that everyday, you can easily and quickly see how long something should have taken and how long it has taken.....allowing you to make decisions.....and 'CONTROL' what happens next in the project.....

i.e do you need to spend more time on a certain task? Have you underestimated the time it will take to do a task? and so on....

It really is beneficial to have some sort of control mechanism. It just depends how in depth you want to make it. At the same time, management may want to see a really high level of control so the example mentioned above may not suffice. You'll need something more.

Management are ALWAYS interested in the money side. They want to know how much money you've got - which they should no anyway.....And how much money you have spent so far.

Watch, monitor and let management know if 1/2 way through the project you are getting close to budget. Dont wait and then let them know. You dont want to get 3/4 of the way through and you have no money left....AND THEN YOU APPROACH MANAGEMENT. Thats not cool.