Supervision, or how to keep our activities under control

Supervision is an indispensable tool for the effective control of the projects and actions we are involved in. It involves observing and influencing the activities and main goals that we intend to carry out.

To be efficient, supervision must be done in an organised manner, and must be used to make others involved in the project aware that we are monitoring the progress of the project and any problems that emerge. Supervision focuses mainly on short-term activities.

The purpose of supervision

Supervision is a routine process. It begins once the planning phase of our project is complete and ends when the project finishes. Effectively, supervision involves keeping a record of problems that have emerged in order to:

• Anticipate similar problems which may arise again
• Identify current problems and mistakes
• Correct problems and redesign certain activities
• Generate feedback
• Encourage progress
• Motivate

What are we supervising?

The specific points to be supervised vary according to the project, but usually include a range of factors related to the project’s operation, technical aspects or costs. It is best to draw up a good supervision plan that includes, for example:

• Activities and progress of our project according to its goals: each activity and important task should be supervised to make sure that we never lose sight of the ultimate goal we have set ourselves.
• Delivery of the project: if the project has stages requiring interaction between our team and other external entities, we must check that communication is taking place properly (i.e. are we sending the right information to the right people at the right time?). We should also check the views of the parties involved. We must ensure that those who have to validate the different parts of the project, complete their assessment at the appropriate time, to avoid surprises once everything is finished.
• Access and use of resources: check the resources provided and reallocate them, if possible, to save costs.
• Current programme and changes to it: we usually need to do a detailed follow-up of projects in which programme changes are anticipated before it starts.

How do you supervise effectively?

Here are some steps for a good supervision process:

• Determine what will be supervised (indicator / measure) depending on the type of task / activity being supervised.
• Decide how and when (how often) it will be supervised. Choose the method or tool for monitoring depending on what is being supervised. For financial supervision, it would be appropriate to use some accounting software or an Excel spreadsheet. For activities or human resources it may be a “to do” list, and for general tasks a list of checkpoints can be used.
• When supervising, develop simple, short and concise recording methods.
• Supervise as has been planned, and recorded what you observe.
• Describe all the problems that you identify.
• Consider whether the problem is so important that you need to find a solution, whether the solution is needed urgently, whether the problem is becoming bigger or smaller, and whether it is related to another problem.
• In addition, monitor how the new solution fits the problem, and write a report on this matter.

To summarise, try to keep all activities for reaching a goal under control. With real-(or quasi-real) time information about all of our processes, it will be easier for us to respond to changes and unforeseen situations, or to correct mistakes which could not be anticipated during the planning phase.