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The Issue Log
What is the issue log? Throughout the life cycle of a project, you (as the project manager) will normally face problems or gaps, inconsistencies or even conflicts in a project. This stuff happens all the time, because your project is designed to bring about change, and so there will always be little things happening – stakeholders to manage or things people will be unhappy about. Maybe the scope needs to change, all of these little things are happening all the time in a project and they occur unexpectedly, and they require some action to bring everything back on track so that it doesn’t impact the project performance in general.
That’s when we need to raise an Issue, once these things have happened.
The issue log is a project document where all of these issues are recorded and tracked. It’s important to note that an issue and a risk are not the same. Before something happens, it’s noted as a risk, and we can note that in the risk assessment, and we’ll assign things like controls to that risk so that we can prevent the risks from happening. We’ll assign owners of those risks to look at the activities around those controls, make sure that things remain on track. Obviously not everything always goes to plan and we can’t always think of everything that will happen, so if something does happen it becomes an issue.
An issue should be noted in the issue log at that time. The issue log will help the project manager effectively track and manage those issues. We’re going to be assigning extra information to these issues so that we can effectively track those issues, and we’re ensuring that they’re investigated and resolved and closed.
Issues may happen at any time, and the issue log is updated as a result of the monitoring and controlling activities throughout the project’s life-cycle. As part of controlling issues it may result in a change request as well. If we’ve raised an issue and it’s resolved, but it is something that needs to change like the scope or the schedule, then we need to raise a change request. Maybe we’re changing one of those baselined documents, around our scope, our time or schedule, or our cost.
These are the three most most important things that will be baselined, and that might need to go through the formal change control process by raising a change request. Then you can update the issue log with all of the appropriate information once that’s resolved.
The data that we’ll put on our issues are things like the issue type, who raised that issue, the description of the issue, priority (is it high, is it low) who is assigned to the issue to manage it ongoing, the target resolution date (is in June, July or August etc), the status current status and of course the final solution to resolving that issue, which is where that change management or the change request might come into it if something needs to change.
So overall it’s a very important part of your project, because you will need to raise and manage these issues as they occur. You’ll still need to keep an eye out for risks as there are you know on the horizon as well before they turn into issues all of this is part of managing a project and keeping it on track and that is the Issue Log.
– David McLachlan