Project Control

1
Project Control

• Kathy S. Schwaig

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What is Project Control?

• Project control is the continuous monitoring of
  the project for deviations from plan (time,
  cost,or quality) and the execution of corrective
  action
• Project Control involves
• Finding and solving problems
• Updating the plan
• Tracking actual resource usage and costs
• Project control requires a comprehensive and
  credible (i.e., realistic and up-to-date) plan

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Two Project Control Approaches

• Continuously and immediately correct all
  deviations from plan
• Periodically re-plan remainder of project
• Which is the better approach?

4
Some Basic Principles of Effective Project Control

• Completion orientation
• Near term commitment
• Preservation of slack
• Mutual accountability

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Project Control Meetings

• Project Control Meetings
• Frequency of meetings depends on project
  duration, complexity, and uncertainty
• Provides a forum for activity mangers to report
  activity status information (actual start date,
  along with either actual finish date, remaining
  duration, or estimated finish date)
• Communication is key
• Problems need to be put on the table for
  discussion----problems need to be identified and
  diagnosed
• Discussion/evaluation of courses and action

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Outcome of Project Control Meetings

• Select/commit to specific action
• Analyze impact on project quality/schedule/budget/
  resource plan
• Revise selected course of action as required
• Reconfirm individual responsibilities (who is
  going to do what)
• Project manager prepares updated project plan and
  report

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Measures of Activity Progress

• Actual start and finish dates
• Estimated remaining duration
• Estimated completion date
• Percent complete
• Which one would you choose?

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Traffic Light Reporting

• Team members are asked to estimate the likelihood
  of meeting the planned target date
• One traffic light reporting scheme
• Green signifies on target
• Yellow signifies not on target but recoverable
• Red signifies not on target and recoverable only
  with difficulty
• Traffic light reporting highlights only the risk
  of non-achievement it is not an attempt to
  estimate work done or to quantify expected delays

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Monitoring and Controlling Project Costs

• Cost monitoring is one aspect of project control
• Not only is it important to control project costs
• Costs provide an indication of the effort that
  has gone into (or at least been charged to ) a
  project
• A project might be on schedule but only because
  more money has been spent on activities than
  originally budgeted
• A cumulative expenditure chart provides a simple
  way to compare actual vs. planned expenditure

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Limitations of Looking at Project Costs

• By themselves, project costs tell us little about
  project status
• Cost charts become much more useful if we add
  projected future costs
• Calculated by adding the estimated costs of
  uncompleted work to the costs already incurred

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Earned Value Analysis

• EVA, or budgeted cost of work performed, has
  become more popular in recent years and
  represents a refinement of cost monitoring
• EVA is based on assigning a value to each task or
  work package based on the original expenditure
  forecasts
• The assigned value is the original budgeted cost
  for the item and is known as the baseline budget
  or budgeted cost of work scheduled (BCWS)

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Earned Value Analysis

• A task that has not yet started is assigned the
  value of zero
• When a task is completed, the project is credited
  with the value of the task
• The total value credited to the project at any
  point is known as the earned value of budgeted
  cost of work performed (BCWP)
• BCWP can be represented as a value or as a
  percentage of the budgeted cost of work scheduled
  (BCWS)

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Earned Value Analysis Assigning Values to Tasks

• Where tasks have been started but are not yet
  complete, some consistent method of assigning an
  earned value must be applied
• The most conservative approach is to assign a
  value of zero until a task is completed, at which
  point it is assigned 100 of the budgeted value.