Management Fundamentals for Project Control

As a project manager, there are a few management fundamentals to consider when establishing your project control system:

• Focus on priorities—Understand what is important to the project and to the organization. Understand that whatever receives your focus will become important. Make sure there is alignment between the two.
• Scale to project—The level of rigor and detail in your project control system should be consistent with the level of risk in the project. It should also be consistent with the project budget. In other words, projects with either low risk or small budgets should not be burdened with a project control system that is designed for larger, mission-critical projects.
• Think “process”—You do not want to spend all your time and energy putting out fires, trying to get basic status information, and feeling like you are not in control of your project. You want to establish a natural system of control for the project; you want to plan it in advance. This applies to the project as a whole and to each individual team member’s contribution.
• Expect changes—Project control does not mean prevent changes at all costs. Conversely, project changes should be expected, planned, and well-managed.
• Invest in thorough planning—The more energy spent in planning, the easier it is to control a project. If the project is defined properly, work is planned from the bottom up, risks have been identified, stakeholders are in agreement on project objectives, and the project control system has been accounted for, then keeping the project on track should take much less effort. Caution15% Completion Rule—No project recovers from a variance at the 15% completion point. If you underestimated the near term, you are generally off on the long term, too.
• Consider organizational culture—Depending on the level of project management maturity in your organization, you might need to consider a gradual implementation of project controlling procedures to achieve greater acceptance and effectiveness. Again, just make sure you focus on top priorities.
• Set expectations—Remember to think “project control” in your project communications. Ensure that each team member understands what is expected from the project and from their individual role. In addition, make sure that the project team sees the discipline and priority that you place on all project control procedures.
• Be consistent—An important element to both effective project control and effective project communications is consistency. Project performance needs to be measured and reported on a consistent, regular basis. This approach is key for both early detection of variances and for establishing a culture of accountability to project assignments.
• Pay attention early—Just to follow up on the last point: make sure to pay close attention to your project early on. According to a study of more than 800 projects for the Department of Defense since 1977, the outcome of a project was no better than its performance taken at the 15% completion point. Thus, if a project was behind schedule and/or over budget at the 15% completion point, it did not recover from this variance. The general consensus is that this happens for two key reasons: lax project controls in the early stages and poor estimating. If the estimates were off for the immediate work efforts, they are unlikely to be more accurate further down the timeline. We discuss how to handle a variance in the “Variance Responses” section later in this chapter.
• Track assumptions and constraints—Often, the key assumptions and constraints for a project are identified during project planning then subsequently forgotten: ”out of sight, out of mind.” Also, many projects do not have a system in place to capture new or changing assumptions and constraints as the project moves forward. One suggestion is to track these alongside issues, risks, and key action items. NoteThe nature of agile project management approaches entails many of these project controlling fundamentals, especially the focus on priorities, expecting changes, setting expectations, being consistent, establishing a natural control process, scaling to match the needs of the project, and factoring the organizational culture.