Project Monitoring, Analytics, and Control (LOs: 6c)

Project Monitoring, Analytics, and Control

Monitoring, measuring, and reporting project performance are essential activities carried out throughout the project life cycle. These processes involve the use of various tools, techniques, and performance indicators to track progress, evaluate variances, and effectively communicate project status to stakeholders.

Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden not a benefit.

– William Pollard

The Big Ideas in this Lesson

As a project manager, you have to balance looking through the front window to see where the project is headed with well-timed glances at the dashboard, while occasionally checking your rearview mirror to see if you might have missed something important.
Different types of projects require different approaches to monitoring, analytics, and control. But any technique is only useful if it enables you to learn and respond. An excessive focus on measurement, without any attempt to learn from the measurements, is not useful.
When reporting on the health of their projects, successful project managers tailor the amount of detail, the perspective, and the format of information to the specific stakeholders who will be consuming it.
Gut instinct, or pure intuition, can make you vulnerable to the errors caused by cognitive biases. Instead, aspire to informed intuition, a combination of information and instinctive understanding acquired through learning and experience.

Source: University of Wisconsin
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