Today’s Lesson

Project Monitoring and

Control
Lesson Learning
Outcomes
 At the conclusion of this lesson, the
student should be able to:
 Understand the purpose of project
monitoring and control
 Differentiate between monitoring and control
 Develop a basic project control system
 Apply the Earned Value Management
system for project monitoring and control.
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
Monitoring vs Control
 Monitoring:
 Collecting, recording and reporting
information concerning any and all aspects of
project performance that the project manager
or others in the organisation wish to know
 Controlling:
 Uses data supplied by the monitoring process
to bring actual performance into approximate
alignment with planned performance.
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
Why Monitor and
Control?
 The purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
(PMC) is to provide an objective analysis of the
progress of a project and to take corrective
action when performance deviates significantly.
The project’s documented plans are the basis
for monitoring activities, communicating status,
and determining needed corrective actions.
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
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
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
Two Project Control
Approaches
 Continuously and immediately correct all
deviations from plan
 Periodically re-plan remainder of project
 Which is the better approach?
Some Basic Principles of
Effective Project Control
 Completion orientation
 Near term commitment
 Preservation of slack
 Mutual accountability
Project Control Meetings

 Project control meetings

 Frequency of meetings depends on project duration,
complexity, and uncertainty
 Provides a forum for activity managers 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 of action
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
Measures of Activity Progress

 Actual start and finish dates

 Estimated remaining duration
 Estimated completion date
 Percent complete
 Which one would you choose?
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
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
Traffic Light Reporting

 Based on a variation of the triple constraint—

budget, schedule, and
functionality/performance, we can define
another traffic light reporting scheme:
 Green: “All three objectives substantially met to
date”
 Yellow: “Two objectives substantially met to date”
 Red: “Less than two objectives substantially met to
date”
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
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
Example of a Cumulative
Expenditure Chart
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
Cumulative Expenditure Chart Showing
Revised Estimates of Cost and
Completion Date
Project Monitoring and
Control
 Monitoring vs. Control
 Purpose of Project Monitoring and Control
 What is project control?
 Some basic approaches and principles for
implementing good project control
 Traffic light reporting: a simple approach for monitoring
and communicating project status
 Monitoring and controlling project costs—the problem
with tracking cumulative expenditures
 Earned value analysis as a project control technique
Earned Value Analysis

 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 (as identified in the
WBS) 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 costs of work scheduled
(BCWS)
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 or
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)
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
Earned Value Analysis:
The Baseline Budget
 The first stage in setting up an earned value
analysis is creating the baseline budget
 The baseline budget is based on the project
plan and shows the forecasted growth in
earned value over time
 Earned value can be measured in monetary
terms (RM), or in staff intensive projects, it can
be measured in person-hours or workdays
Guidelines for Effective
Project Control
 Focus on the future—not the past
 Be proactive in identifying and solving
problems
 Continuously reconfirm status of on-going and
near term activities
 Concentrate on monitoring and controlling
project progress vs. schedule—this is more
important than tracking actual resource usage
and costs
 Update the project network diagram to reflect
changes in schedule