Monitoring & Controlling

Drive your project don’t let It drive you

Project control consists of ensuring that your project is progressing according to plan, and taking action if any deviation from the plan is identified.

Use the project plan to monitor and control your project. During the controlling process, you may have to update the project plan and other documents such as requirements and functional specifications.

Project Tracking

The project should be tracked on regular basis and corrective actions should be taken accordingly to the project’s progress or deviation from the original baseline. Successful Project Management Principles & Controls are summarized as three main methods:

• Continually focus on the Project Plan as the basis of your project
• Continually update the Project Plan (especially the schedule, scope, and budget)
• Regularly (better still, at scheduled intervals or on achievement of milestones) measure status and project progress against the Project Plan - and make adjustments to get back on track, if necessary
• Follow up Follow up Follow up

Additionally, Project Management Principles & Controls include managing the inevitable conflicts and changes that arise during a project – Conflict Management and Change Control.

Tip: Use weekly and daily reminders, agenda or tasks list for follow up.

Review Meetings

Hold review meetings at regular intervals to control project progress. Follow these tips to ensure that your review meetings are effective:

• Have an informal discussion with your key team members before the meeting.
• Do a detailed project review on your own – carefully review all the tasks that need to be completed in the next three to six weeks. By doing so you may identify issues that need to be discussed during the meeting.
• Now circulate a meeting agenda to all participants.
• If decisions need to be made at the meeting, make sure that the person with the authority to make the decisions attends the meeting.
• Start a meeting by specifying its objectives.
• Quickly compare the project’s current status with the original project plan.
• Follow the initially established agenda and avoid straying from it.
• Ensure that the meetings are not too long and make efficient use of the participants’ time.
• Always end by recapitulating the decisions made, and the next steps.

Write a meeting report and circulate it within 24 hours of the meeting. Depending on the situation, you might want to write a detailed report or just a simple list of decisions that were made, and actions to be taken.

Resolving Conflicts

Conflicts are inevitable when people (especially from different backgrounds) work together on a project. Conflicts in projects typically fall into the following categories:

• Conflict over different objectives and expectations.
• Unclear roles and uncertainty about who has the decision-making authority.
• Interpersonal conflicts between people.

Here is a method known as the “win-win” approach to conflict resolution:

1. Before you start resolving a conflict, analyze it by asking questions from the conflicting parties.
2. Once you have sufficient information about the conflict, actively seek common ground in order to emphasize the agreement side of things – this starts the conflict resolution process on a positive note.
3. Now ask the conflicting parties to brainstorm possible solutions to the issues at hand.
4. Once you have identified resolutions, agree upon guidelines on how to implement these resolutions.
5. Document and then implement the resolutions.

The “win-win” conflict resolution method is generally accepted as being a fair one as it allows the conflicting parties to be heard and involves them in working together to find a solution to the conflict. However, the “win-win” method does not always work. In this case, you should agree with the conflicting parties that the conflict is unresolved. You can now adopt one of the following approaches:

• If the conflict is of a technical nature, bring in a technical expert whose opinion the conflicting parties value, and ask him or her to help resolve the conflict.
• If the conflict is not of a technical nature, involve the project sponsor or a senior manager to help you out. This method however, should only be used when all other methods have failed – people do not like being forced by supervisors to do something they do not feel comfortable with.

Also, note that if properly managed, certain conflicts can be actually good for your team as they may generate new, more effective ways of accomplishing activities. Careful however, when dealing with a multicultural team as conflicts are not perceived the same way in Germany, France, the UK, the US, India or China. Whenever conflicts arise, always keep the goal of your project in mind and try to resolve them as quickly as possible.

Resolving Project Problems

Every project has its share of problems, which can be classified into the following categories:

• People: your team lacks skills required to accomplish the project activities correctly. In this case, consider the following:
  • Train your people if your project’s schedule and budget allows for it. Ideally such training requirements should be identified and factored into your project plan when you were selecting project team members.
  • Consider calling in an outside consultant or vendor.
• Your project is falling behind schedule:
  • Review the priorities of tasks and see if all of them are really necessary.
  • Do not accept additional tasks. This is easier said than done, but there are times when you have to say NO.
• Project costs are exceeding the established budget:
  • Regularly monitor costs throughout the project so that you are aware of any potential cost overruns as soon as possible.
• The scope of the project keeps changing (refer to “Controlling Change”  post).

The causes of many project problems are as follows:

• Poor scoping – the scope and objectives of the project are vague. Maybe some of the stakeholders never really read the scope requirements.
• Poor planning – activities are unclear, the processes are not well-documented, risks have not been well identified and prepared for, the project manager lacks experience, ineffective project communications, and so on.

Cost Overrun & Schedule Delay

A Cost overrun, also known as a cost increase or budget overrun, is an unexpected cost incurred in excess of a budgeted amount due to an under-estimation of the actual cost during budgeting. Cost overrun should be distinguished from cost escalation, which is used to express an anticipated growth in a budgeted cost due to factors such as inflation.

Schedule delay is different than cost overrun. It refers to the late delivery of the project whether there is a cost overrun or not.

Common Overrun Reasons

All projects are prone to overrun. An overrun acceptance is directly proportional to an organization’s fault absorption capacity. Accordingly the definition of overrun is framed to demonstrate an overrun project as rightly completed project.

5 myths about Project Overrun could be:

• Planning: After the initial plan is made, customer requirements have shrunk but it is good not to revise the plan to achieve in-time project closure (or even earlier).
• Manpower: Project Plan is made after which additional manpower is inducted in the project, but no need to revise the plan.
• Cost: Customer is ready to pay the full payment to complete the project, even if it overshoots the timeframe decided as per plan.
• Time: A project had to complete in 5 months, but it took 10 months to complete. Imagine the manpower engaged in this project that could have finished another project if this project finished in time.
• Customer: Customer is not able to cope up with plan but not ready to pay for extra efforts being done by the project team on behalf of customer thereby overshooting cost and time. We have a valid reason for this overshoot.

Tip: Projects overrun because most owner and contractor organizations lack a practical and disciplined approach to Risk Management – as a result, risks are seldom understood or mitigated effectively.

Controlling Change

Seasoned project managers often identify dealing with changes and project creep as one of the most (if not the most) challenging problems that a project manager has to face. The very nature of projects makes change inevitable. Changes often impact the project’s budget and schedule (and sometimes the outcome). To cope with changes use a formal change control procedure as follows:

1. When someone asks you for a change that will potentially impact your project, insist that the requestor submit the change request in writing using a change request template.
2. Review the impact of the change on your project in terms of cost, schedule, performance and outcome. Review also what will happen if you do not implement the change.
3. Accept or reject the change – depending on the importance of the change, you can involve your team members and/or the project sponsor in making the decision. If the change has been rejected, inform the requestor and all concerned parties.
4. If the change has been accepted, document it, and update your project plan to take into account the change’s impact on your project’s schedule, budget and outcome.
5. Communicate the accepted change and its impact to the requestor and all concerned parties (include the change in your next project review meeting).