management overhead

A while back I was asked if the effort expended to determine your progress/position in a project was worthwhile.

Well...

In almost all cases the answer is YES.

If you don't measure/review, then you cannot know if you're moving in the right direction. I won't bore you with an analogy of a boat a sea without a GPS... I'm sure you can imagine that.

So how do you determine how you're going? This is really something that is different from project to project, but assuming that you've got a project goal, you can assess your position against that. You do have a project goal, right?

An I'm assuming that from your goal you've worked out milestones? Yes, of course you have. So all you have to do is work out how you'll move from milestone to milestone, all the wile moving in the direction of your goal.

Easy.