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Project Portal
| Manage Issues ( 2 : PMC : 2 : 2 ) Project Manager
|  | Participating Roles Responsible: Project Manager Business Analyst Accountable: Project Manager Informed: IPM Officer
### Overview Issues are raised because special cause events have blocked the ability for project work items to flow through the software engineering system. They may already be affecting the critical path of the project plan. Alternatively, issues occur because a potential problem has been identified in advance and action is required to prevent it from affecting the flow and critical path in the future. In this respect, it is similar to mitigating risk but is discovered spontaneously during the project. Prompt issue resolution keeps the work in the project flowing, avoids critical path impact, and enables the team to maintain the project commitments. # Entry Criteria Issues New issues discovered on a daily basis from development or project team meetings. Corrective Action Plans Corrective Action Plans made elsewhere; such as, monthly operations review meetings, or audits. When: Daily and on-going throughout the project. # Activities
1 | Issue Log Review | Daily meeting to review the status of new and currently open issues. New issues should be assigned for analysis and corrective action.
2 | Analyze Issue | Each new issue should be analyzed for both its symptoms and root cause. An action plan of corrective action should be made to address the symptoms or (preferably) the root cause. Corrective action which addresses the root cause is preferable but may be disruptive to the running project or overly costly and hence, not feasible within current budget constraints. In this case, a solution which addresses the symptoms should be used instead. The action plan should be broken into tasks. Tasks should be assigned to individual team members for resolution.
3 | Take Corrective Action | Corrective action tasks should be undertaken and resolved. The source issue should be resolved. Any blocking work items should be unblocked. This will be verified with a review of the corrective action.
4 | Monitor Corrective Action | The team should maintain the status of issue work items and corrective action tasks in Visual Studio Team System in order that they can be monitored by other team members anxious to know whether blocked work items will be freed soon. Use the reports to monitor the status of issues and corrective action tasks.
5 | Review Action and Verify Resolution | Once all the corrective action tasks for an issue are resolved, meet with appropriate affected team members. Consider the original issue and any blocked work items. Has the corrective action successfully unblocked the work items and resolved the issue? If not, then rework the corrective actions and reassign back to team members. Was the corrective action carried out promptly? Was a special cause event and impact to the critical path of the schedule avoided? Are the project commitments safe, or will they have to be renegotiated? Report the results to the IPM officer.
# Exit Criteria
| A report containing the answers to the review questions which can be shared with management across the team and more senior management in the organization.
| A list of task work items to implement the corrective action plan.
| A suggested process change to eliminate the root cause of a blocking issue.
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