Issue Management involves capturing, reporting, resolving, escalating and tracking issues that occur as a project progresses in accordance with the Issue Management Plan (refer to 7.4.5).
Anyone involved in the project can and should inform the Project Manager of identified issues. It is the responsibility of the Project Manager to foster an environment where communicating issues is strongly encouraged. If individuals are fearful of communicating issues the resulting effect on the project can be extremely serious.
The Project Manager should capture and track issues as soon as they arise using the Issue Log. Once a description of a new issue has been logged, the Project Manager should estimate the potential impact that the issue could have on the project. Based upon potential impact the Project Manager must prioritize the issue in relation to all other open issues. The goal of issue management is to resolve all problems completely and promptly, but in reality the issues with the highest priority should be addressed first.
It should be noted that the urgency and the importance of a project issue are not the same thing. The Project Manager must deal with urgent project issues quickly, whereas with important issues comprehensively.
The Project Manager or the Project Steering Committee (depending on the limits authority to handle issues) may decide either:
| ● | to assign resolution actions, or |
| ● | to raise a project risk if the issue is likely to impact the project in the future, or |
| ● | to raise a change request (or ask the Contractor to raise a change request) if the issue results in the need for a change to the project/ contract, or |
| ● | to close the issue if this is not impacting the project anymore. |
The Project Manager should monitor the implementation of the resolution actions and update the Issue Log (refer to Annex 7-5) to reflect what has occurred. As issues are closed their status should be changed to “closed” and the name of the person who resolved the issue, as well as the closure date should be documented.
The Project Manager should review periodically the Issue Log to identify the issues that have not been resolved till that moment. All open issues should be reviewed and discussed at the next status meeting since unresolved issues are one of the most important reasons for project failure.