1.7 Issue Management

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Issue management facilitates identification, analysis, escalation, reporting, and resolution of the project's issues. Any decisions to be made regarding the development of the business capability or the management of the project are classified as an issue. Issue management will enable the project Core Team to create strategies that effectively address potential barriers to project success. Issue management should be carried out at all levels within the project. The issue management process should ensure that issues are resolved at the appropriate level and are communicated as appropriate. Sometimes, organizations set up a Change Control Board (CCB) to process and prioritize issues as they arise.

Issues are resolved with action items, which can span a single project or multiple projects. Issues can escalate, and they should be proactively raised during the course of project execution. Having a formal issue management process achieves several important objectives, such as providing informed, proactive, and timely management of issues; allowing a team to analyze project concerns and issues, including those that span multiple areas; and ensuring that all stakeholders are informed of and participate in issue resolution. The benefits of formal issue management are also easily identified. It facilitates appropriate escalations for project issues that remain unresolved. Issue management can enable timely issue resolution through prioritization of service, schedule, costs, performance, or quality. Formalized issue management can improve quality; enable root-cause analysis; provide future project teams with key lessons learned, project history, and project metrics; and allow for future risk analysis through documentation of the issue and its resolution.

1.7.1 Issue Escalation

Sometimes a project team must escalate issues that impede the progress of a project and are beyond the authority of the Project Manager to resolve. These issues generally cannot be resolved by anyone within the Core Team. The escalation path is from the Core Team to the Project Manager to the Program Manager to the Project Sponsor. These issues may even need to be further escalated to the Executive Stakeholder or the company CEO, depending on the nature and severity of the issue. They are resolvable with action items and affect project scope, cost, schedule, projected business performance, or business capability. Multiple projects or releases can also be affected by an issue. Such issues do not have a clearly defined owner. The project team should focus on issues that are mission critical and those that are past due.

1.7.2 Issue Reporting

The Project Manager is responsible for regularly assessing the overall issue status (e.g., new issues per period, critical issues). He or she should monitor issue resolution progress and identify potential bottlenecks and/or increases in the number of open issues. These discoveries should be integrated into the issue status section found in the weekly project reports. Some examples of issue metrics include tracking the number of new issues and the number of issues resolved since the last reporting period, the timeliness of issue resolution by issue importance, mission-critical issues and their due dates, and the total number of open and closed issues.

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