Project control is a series of activities applied in a systematic way to manage capital, resources, and time so that projects achieve expected results. It is the integration of the work to be done, and its associated cost and schedule.
The goal of project control is to increase the likelihood that projects will be successful. Success means delivering expected functionality and business benefits in accordance with requirements, on-time and near-budget, properly documented. Control is attained by implementing a lifecycle that identifies and acts on issues in a way that positively impacts project outcome. The control lifecycle consists of the following major categories:
- establish a plan
- track performance
- compare actual performance to the plan
- measure and report performance
- take corrective action to address discrepancies between actual and planned performance
Project control consists of tactical activities required to ensure projects are successfully delivered in the areas of cost, schedule, quality, scope, resource, and functionality. It’s important to assign those to project control for the most risky and complex projects so that Project Managers or other stakeholders can focus on other factors that impact project management like customer relationships, long-range planning, inter-project dependencies, business development, overall program performance, meeting business objectives, external staffing, integrating technical and project resources, and financial imperatives. In owning tactical project management, project control becomes a force multiplier that allows an organization to improve project performance by focusing specialists on critical project success factors, and increasing Project Manager utilization and project throughput.
Project Control has the greatest potential to impact outcomes during planning, and is most visible during implementation. Initial project control efforts are focused on facilitating planning sessions with stakeholders to develop integrated scope and execution plans from functional and technical requirements. Scope should be defined and expressed in a detailed work breakdown structure. Final scope becomes a baseline from which all scope changes can be tracked and against which work performance can be measured.
Project control includes developing schedule durations, dates, levels of effort, dependencies, and resources. Scheduling is closely integrated with resource management, a process of defining resources required for a project, and assigning them in ways that optimize resource utilization and completion date constraints. This process results in resource-loaded logic networks that communicate planned activities and start and finish dates that produce an overall project completion date, a critical path, and the capability for schedule analysis. In the absence of dedicated estimators, project control resources can also be assigned project cost estimating. Estimated costs are allocated to activities to produce a budget, and are distributed over time to produce a forecast. Project control also owns value engineering which analyzes the functional value of deliverables in terms of the ratio of function to cost. Project control includes risk and issues management. Risk is managed by conducting analyses to develop a likelihood of occurrence, and the severity of impact for each identified risk. This analysis drives risk prioritization. High likelihood and impact risks are normally assigned mitigation plans that should be included in a project budget. IT project control often also includes a process for planning and implementing software releases. Release management consists of testing, confirming that monitoring tools are in-place, developing and implementing a rollout plan, and ensuring that knowledge is transferred to operations and support staff. It includes designing and executing pilots, validating that all items are secure and traceable, and providing limited technical support.
In implementation, project control focuses on tracking cost, schedule, quality, functionality, and scope performance, comparing actual performance to the plan, and acting on variances. Tracking includes monitoring activity progress, and measuring and reporting performance. Actual performance is compared to baseline expectations in variance analysis for a measure of project performance. There are many project performance metrics including overall dashboard health, revised cost estimates at-completion, cost performance indices, schedule performance indices, resource utilization, requirements traceability, quality compliance, return on investment, business benefit enablement, effort metrics, customer satisfaction, capability maturity, and project throughput. Any performance gaps are opportunities for investigating root causes, and developing mitigation strategies, corrective action plans, and contingency actions. Scope change management is a crucial element of project control that documents departures from baseline plans, and ensures that all changes are communicated and approved prior to implementation. Changes must be accompanied by justification, an analysis of alternatives, a funding source (typically either contingency or a budget change), resultant cost and schedule impacts, and approvals. Approved changes are included in a revised scope document (baseline plus approved changes) that becomes the basis for revised performance measurement.
Project control increases project management cost. However, properly applied, it’s an essential and high-value differentiator that helps meet expectations, and that results in higher quality deliverables, business benefits realization, and overall project, program, and portfolio success.