9.4: Best Practices for Active Control

Monitoring and Control

When setting up monitoring and controlling systems for a new project, it’s essential to remember that not all projects are the same. What works for one project might not work for another, even if both seem similar. Also, the amount of monitoring and controlling required might vary depending on your experience. Suppose you’ve never worked on a particular type of project before. In that case, the work involved in setting up a reliable monitoring and controlling system will typically be much greater than the up-front work required for a project you’ve done many times before. For projects you repeat regularly, you’ll typically have standard processes in place that will make it easy for you to keep an eye on the project’s overall performance.

Exactly which items you need to monitor will vary from project to project and from one industry to another. But in any industry, you usually only need to monitor a handful of metrics. There’s no need to over-complicate things. For example, when managing major construction projects for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Gary Whited focused on these major items:

• Schedule
• Cost/budget
• Issues specific to the project
• Risk

He also recommends monitoring the following:

• Quality
• Safety
• Production rates
• Quantities

In other projects, you will probably need to monitor different issues. But it’s always a good idea to focus on information that can serve as early warnings, allowing you to change course if necessary. This typically includes the following:

• Current status of schedule and budget
• Expected cost to complete
• Expected date(s) of completion
• Current/expected problems, impacts, and urgency
• Causes for schedule/cost overruns

As Whited explains, the bottom line is this: “If it’s important to the success of your project, you should be monitoring it” (Whited, 2014).

Note that measuring the percentage completed on individual tasks is useful in some industries where tasks play out over a long period. According to Dave Pagenkopf, the percent completion of individual tasks is meaningless in the IT world: “The task is either complete or not complete. At the project level, the percent complete may mean something. You really do need to know which tasks/features are 100% complete. However, sloppy progress reports can generate confusion on this point. 100% of the functions in a software product 80% complete is not the same as having 80% of the features 100% complete. A poorly designed progress report can make these look the same, when they most definitely are not.” (pers. comm., November 13, 2017).

In addition to deciding what to monitor, you must decide how often to take a particular measurement. As a general rule, you should measure as often as you need to make meaningful course corrections. You’ll need to monitor some items continuously; for others, a regular check-in is appropriate. Most projects include major milestones or phases that serve as a prime opportunity for monitoring important indicators. Gary Whited notes, “The most important thing is to monitor your project while there is still time to react. That’s the reason for taking measurements in the first place” (Whited, 2014).

Change Control

When you find a problem, you can’t just make a change because it may be too expensive or take too long. You will need to examine how it affects the triple constraint (time, cost, scope) and project quality. You will then have to determine if it is worth making the change. If you evaluate the impact of the change and find that it won’t impact the project triple constraint, then you can make the change without going through change control. Change control is a set of procedures that lets you make changes in an organized way.

Any time you need to change your plan, you must start with a change request. This is a document that either you or the person making the request must complete. Any change to your project must be documented so you can figure out what needs to be done, by when, and by whom.

Once the change request is documented, it is submitted to a change control board. A change control board is a group of people who consider changes for approval. Not every change control system has a board, but most do. The change request could also be submitted to the project sponsor or management for review and approval. Putting the recommended changes through change control will help you evaluate the impact and update all the necessary documents. Not all changes are approved, but if approved, you send them back to the team to put them in place.

The implementation phase uses the most project time and resources, so costs are usually the highest during this phase. Project managers also experience the greatest conflicts over schedules in this phase. As you monitor your project, you may find that the actual time it takes to do the scheduled work is longer than the planned time.

When you have to meet the date and are running behind, you can sometimes find ways to do activities more quickly by adding more resources to critical path tasks. That’s called crashing. Crashing the schedule means adding resources or moving them around to align the project with the schedule. Crashing always costs more and doesn’t always work. There’s no way to crash a schedule without raising the project’s overall cost. So, if the budget is fixed and you don’t have any extra money to spend, you can’t use this technique.

Sometimes, you’ve got two activities planned to occur in sequence, but you can do them simultaneously. This is called fast-tracking the project. On a software project, you might do both your user acceptance testing (UAT) and your functional testing simultaneously, for example. This is pretty risky. There’s a good chance you might need to redo some of the work you have done concurrently. Crashing and fast-tracking are schedule compression tools. Managing a schedule change means keeping all your schedule documents current. That way, you will always be comparing your results to the correct plan.

After the deliverables have been physically constructed and accepted by the customer, a phase review is carried out to determine whether the project is complete and ready for closure.

Current Best Practices

Monitoring public sector contracts effectively involves setting clear expectations and regularly auditing against the performance guidelines. When the government and a supplier enter into a contract, both parties have legal obligations to meet its terms and conditions.

Contract lifecycle management holds suppliers accountable for satisfying the operational requirements of the Government and helps achieve the best value for the Canadian taxpayer.

Realizing Value from Contract Management