The more time you spend in reporting on what you are doing, the less time you have to do anything. Stability is achieved when you spend all your time doing nothing but reporting on the nothing you are doing.
We as project managers never like to slide our schedules, but it does happen from time to time, sometimes due mistakes we have made or occasionally because of events out of our control.
On a recent project, I was the PM on a sub-contract to a prime contractor working on a government project. I was forced to take a 4 week slide in our delivery schedule due to a quality issue from our offshore supplier.
The Prime reacted immediately and scheduled daily conference calls to “help me” get back on schedule. The micro-management was painful and contributed to additional delays, due to the amount of time I needed to prepare for each of the daily calls.
Suddenly the Prime took control of over 20% percent of my day. An hour to prepare for the meeting and a meeting that sometimes lasted more than an hour; that’s 2 hours out of my already long 10 hour day.
The time I needed to get my schedule back on track was consumed with reporting on what I was doing to get my project back on schedule.