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Monitoring Your Program Health (Dependencies)

As a project / program manager, dependencies can be the hardest thing for you to keep track of / manage, because of all the things that you are responsible for, these are the ones that are most out of your control.   So you need to coordinate with other project / program managers on a regular basis to make sure that your dependencies on them are still on schedule or if they've slipped.  (In most cases, they'll have slipped, and if you aren't being vigilant yourself, no one will have remembered to tell you)

I'm enclosing a sample dependency tracking sheet that I've used in the past and I'm listing how to get the most out of it based on past experience, to give you another tool in keeping control of your project / program.

The dependency column is to put a description of the dependency that you are tracking.  It could be another project that you are dependent on, a specific application, a piece of hardware, or even a component like a web service.  The next column is to indicate whether or not the dependency is internal to your project / program or external.   For instance, on the hardware / infrastructure side, the purchase and setup of a server for your application would be internal to your project, but the migration of the data center would be external.   Some people might not think to track the migration of the data center, but if the migration dates slip, then your project might be just as impacted as if they didn't setup the server you wanted.   The same with dependencies on other applications.   If your application interacts with another application, and that application is having a maintenance release around the time that you are planning testing, that is an external impact to your project, because even though that maintenance release has nothing to do with you, if the release has problems, then that team or their application may not be available to test the interactions with your application.

And then as before you want to track your original date, the current date, and the amount of times you've had to revise the current date.  And you want space to be able to enter comments.  These fields will help you articulate the impact to your project of these dependencies and help line up management support to address these items that are largely out of your control.