D01 – Manage follow-up items

This management activity belongs to the Daily Management group. The activities in this group are for the day-to-day work of the program.


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What

This activity is for the daily management of risks, issues, and other ad hoc sources of action at the program level: everything that has been captured in the Follow-Up Register. Each item’s custodian follows up on the item until it’s closed.

Why

The main goal is to respond to risks, issues, and other ad hoc sources of action proactively rather than letting them be resolved automatically. Doing so will give you control and the possibility of getting better results.

Relying on your memory or on unstructured notes takes too much mental energy and runs the risk of forgetting items. That’s why it’s best to have a simple register and the self-discipline to record items as soon as they are identified.

It takes too much time and energy to manage all the items, which is why you need to assign custodians. In addition to spreading the work, it also helps align everyone with the same goal.

Who

The program manager is responsible for creating new items in the Follow-Up Register, but everyone should help identify the items.

Each item in the Follow-Up Register should have a custodian to follow up on it and update the item. The custodian must be one of the solution ideation team members or one of the project managers working in the program. The program manager supervises the process to ensure that custodians are fulfilling their responsibility well.

Each item in the Follow-Up Register has zero or more actions. Each action can have one or more people responsible for doing it. Note that the custodian is only responsible for following up and reporting.

How

There’s a Follow-Up Register at the program level for items that impact more than one project. Each project has its own register as well, for items that only impact that project. Finally, if there’s a portfolio management system, they may have a register for items that impact more than one program or standalone project. Based on the scope of impact of the item you’ve discovered, you should record it in your own register or send it to the layer below or above. Potential dependencies among projects are examples of follow-up items that should be managed in an integrated way in this activity.

The program manager should ensure that all project managers check the program’s and portfolio’s Follow-Up Registers alongside their local Follow-Up Register.

You should record new items immediately to ensure you won’t forget about them. You don’t have to plan the item immediately after adding it to the register, though – you can come back to the register at appropriate intervals to plan the new items with the help of your team. Make sure the item explains the impact of the item on the target Scenario and other viable Scenarios, and gradually add actions to it to bring it under control.

A key step in planning a new item is to assign one of the solution ideation team members or one of the project managers working in the program as its custodian. Then, the custodian will be responsible for continually adding comments to the item to reflect the new information. They should also follow up on the actions to make sure they are done.

The following is an example of a simple follow-up item:

Potential war between X and Y

Custodian: Celes

2026-02-05, Description:

There’s been a conflict between X and Y, and some predict that those two countries might start a war. If it happens, it would probably increase the price of most materials we have to buy for the project. Since we have a fixed-price contract, the customer won’t compensate us for that, and we might run into financial difficulties.

2026-02-08, Action:

A good option for us is to buy all the material right now. Tiam will estimate how much we have to pay to buy all the materials and how much it will cost to store them safely for the duration of the project. Zia will check to see how quickly we can get the money from the procurement department to buy them.

2026-02-09, Comment:

In our contract, we’ve charged the customer 1,200 units for the material. If we buy them in bulk, upfront, it would cost us 1,050, but we’ll have to pay about 250 for the safe storage of them. If we don’t do anything and the war starts, our cost would be between 1,200 and 3,000. We’re still waiting to get information about our budget.

2026-02-11, Comment + Action:

The sponsor talked to the company, and the best they can do is to give us 400 units in the next few weeks! Let’s see if the customer can pay some of the contract price in advance to help us with this case. Casey will do that.

2026-02-15, Comment + Action:

The customer agreed to pay the 650 units we need in advance, so Karabo can now start buying all the materials for us!

2026-02-27, Comment:

The procurement is complete. It has cost us 1,100 to buy all the materials. We also set up local storage on the site which cost us 150 units.

Item closed.

You should use the expertise of the solution ideation team and the program’s project managers to design proactive actions for the follow-up items. The goal is to close each item as soon as possible. An item can be closed in one of the following ways:

Normally, OMIMO’s Follow-Up Registers are created in flow boards (also known as Kanban boards).