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MAINTAINING THE PLAN 217

work out of sequence just because the plan showed it that way. The plan is a
statement of the team’s intentions. In most cases, it reflects the preferred way to
do the work, rather than the only way to do the work. In developing the CPM, the
planner must choose a single alternative, although several options may exist.

Obviously, it is a good idea to communicate with the project manager or team
leader when you are deviating from the published plan. But it is not practical to
assume that the plan is cast in concrete.

There are two misconceptions regarding updating the plan that need to be ex-
posed and critiqued. The first one is the implied advantages of real-time statusing.
This popular capability, achievable today due to recent advances in real-time ac-
cess to project databases, can actually be a disadvantage, especially when imple-
mented without management oversight. We discuss these issues in Chapter 7.2.

The other misconception is something called automatic updating. Any thought
of maintaining the plan by assuming that everything is occurring as planned, or
that status changes do not need to be evaluated and managed, should be
promptly challenged. We discuss why in Chapter 7.3.

Traps Caution is advised when you are using today’s in-
stant updating and access capabilities. Data needs to be
evaluated and tested for validity before broadcasting it to
the project universe.

Caution is also advised when you are using the automatic
updating capabilities of today’s tools. Allowing the pro-
gram to assume that work was done as planned, without
human involvement in the statusing, does not constitute
plan management.