The Purpose of Project Control

The purpose of the project control or implementation phase is four-fold:

The medical analogy
The whole process is not very different from the case of a medical doctor presented with a patient with symptoms. The doctor examines, compares results with expectations (as provided by medical science), diagnoses illnesses and prescribes treatment.

Project managers play the doctor role, examining the project (patient), looking for symptoms (poor progress, excess expenditure, time delays), seeking reasons (inefficient or absent resources,) and administering anti-dotes (extending durations, providing additional resources).

In the project management context, the four steps mentioned above are:

1. Monitoring
2. Tracking
3. Interpretation
4. Taking corrective action

The following schema describes the process and flow of information:

Monitoring requires continual observation and measurement of the 'actuals', that is actual starts and finishes, actual effort, actual progress and efficiencies. It requires a systematic reporting system involving the participation of team members who provide feedback on a periodic basis.

Tracking involves the ongoing recording and comparison of these 'actuals' with the plan, searching for significant departures as an early warning of problems. Only by maintaining an ongoing record of results can trends and patterns be detected. The table below shows a typical representation of data collected for a given progress measure for a particular task.

Interpretation is the attempt to understand why deviations from the plan are occurring. This can be assisted by certain reporting parameters which are designed to indicate possible reasons for emerging problems. These include Earned Value analysis and critical ratio analysis, topics to be covered in future articles. In this case the actual values recorded are trailing the baseline (originally predicted) values somewhat consistently, indicating an ongoing problem regarding the rate of work.

This could be due to lack of skill, greater resistance encountered on the job, or a mis-estimate of the work originally. The forecast column indicates that at roughly current rates, the task will run late. The last row also indicates that additional work will be required for the task. The information can be shown graphically as follows:

Taking action means moving in a manner to modify the current forecasts Possible actions could include adding resources, extending durations or deadlines, overlapping tasks formerly arranged in sequence or even modifying the nature of the task.