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8

Taking the Watch (Monitoring

and Controlling)

One of the primary duties of the project manager and project management
team is to monitor and control the project to ensure that the project plan
is being effectively executed. Monitoring includes the processes used to
gather, document, and inform about project progress, and controlling is
about using that data to make project decisions.

the dikW Pyramid

We like to say that it is the job of the project manager to advance data
into information, knowledge, and even wisdom. This is called the
knowledge or DIKW pyramid.

Data means bits of project information not organized in any par-
ticular way. I picture a phone number, a test measurement, a tem-
perature, and a Web site address thrown haphazardly together in
an e-mail.
Information is a state in which there is order to that madness. Now
I picture a stakeholder contact list, organized and sorted by inter-
nal and external stakeholders, and whether they have high or low
risk tolerance, and are in favor of or opposed to the project, asso-
ciated with all of their contact numbers.
Knowledge is that information leveraged to convey some important
meaning. So we may have the information on our stakeholders
organized so that we know not only phone numbers and e-mail
addresses, but also key behaviors of stakeholders. For instance,
we know that when a certain stakeholder calls us, we are dealing

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