Abstract : Almost no project can be delivered smoothly without facing some obstacles and issues during its lifecycle from concept till closure. This inevitable topic of ‘‘project issue management” did not attain the appropriate attention either in the literature or in the project management standards or implementation practices. This paper explores the current awareness status and level of implementation of the topic within the project management environment. The conducted survey revealed that this topic is immature and needs to be fostered through awareness, training, institutionalizing, automation and finally standardization. Within this context, a process flow is suggested to be a standard operating procedure to deal with issues during projects implementation. This flow is then verified and validated. To reinforce the topic, an index was newly developed and validated to show the status of issues within projects with the aim of inclusion of this index within the overall project health indicator. Finally, new knowledge area was suggested in a similar way of the American international standard of project management (PMBOK) as an initial trial for the PMBOK update process every four years.
? Existing users of the Firm Gateway Filings Platform will automatically have access to the Issue Management System using their existing log in credentials.
? Issues exist in a project when there is a possibility the project is not meeting defined goals and objectives.
? Issues can be closed when the steps in the Resolution Plan are complete and the Owner, Originator, and CA-MMIS Counterparts agree that the Issue no longer exists.
? The priority of the Issue in relation to other Issues where contention for resources may exist. This should be established by project management through regular review meetings
? Despite of the impact of ignoring project issues, the topic did not gain the required attention in project plans, manuals, or international standards.
? Other authors searched this topic but from the software industry perspective and focused on the issues resulting during the software development.
? To track the progress of the issues resolution, Mind suggested having a clear label identifying the issue’s overall status.
? However, instead of probability (in the case of risk matrix), the rows relate to ranges of time in which the issue needs to be resolved before the impact negatively affects the success of the project.
• The proposed Issue should be reviewed with the appropriate Responsible Manager for assessment to determine whether the question, problem, or condition is an Action Item, Issue, or Risk.
• If an agreement cannot be reached, the Issue, in proposed status, should be escalated to a higher Governance entity per the Governance Management Plan.
• During the ERIC meeting, the committee reviews the proposed Issue and provides approvals on opening or cancelling a proposed Issue and provides feedback as needed.
• In addition, upon assessment, proposed Issues may be identified as Action Items.
? They recommend having a score to measure the project issue index and be included in an overall project performance indicator.
? The following paragraphs show the efforts done to develop a metric for measuring the project issue status and how this metric was checked for sanity.
? There was an extensive discussion to have a complete dashboard for the project to include all project indicators (time performance, cost, risk, quality) in one unified indicator and to add the issue as a new factor.
? The PMBOK methodology in establishing the processes starts with describing the Inputs required to start the process, then the Tools and Techniques that will be used to perform the process and the Outputs resulting from the process
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