Monitoring and Control (LOs: 5c)

Monitoring and controlling involves regularly measuring progress on a project to ensure it continues meeting objectives and addressing current organizational needs. It involves determining what corrective action is required, when it must occur, and who must do it. Monitoring should begin in the planning phase because it is easy to get off track with planning efforts. When the predictive/waterfall development methodology is used, the team is monitoring performance against the timeline, budget, scope, and quality objectives for the entire project. When an adaptive approach is used, progress within the iteration is assessed.

It is important to note that it is much easier to monitor project success on small projects. Due to far fewer team members, stakeholders, and complexities to consider, the project's progress is more easily observed. However, on higher complexity projects that require many people, who are often spread out over different locations, project leaders are unable to use simple observation to assess progress. In these instances, it is important to have more robust tools and techniques that monitor the success of the full project team.

The project team evaluates its performance against the plans that have been developed. Every project requires a monitoring and control system. This system considers the following:

1. What information is needed and how should it be collected?
2. When (and with what frequency) should this information be collected?
3. Who should collect and analyze this information?
4. How should this information be represented from a reporting perspective?
5. Who should prepare the report?
6. Who should receive the reports?

Commonly collected information includes the status of the project budget and the project schedule. The work completed to date, what has yet to be completed, and the likelihood of completing the project on time and on budget are of particular interest. In addition, it is important to identify the risks and issues that require attention. Whenever possible, information technology should be used to collect and analyze the information, and distribute the reports. Different organizations require different roles to collect and analyze the project information. In organizations with a project management office (PMO), they may be accountable for progress reporting in an "end-to-end" way, meaning they would be involved from information collection all the way to report distribution. Organizational culture influences who and how progress monitoring is performed.

One of the common methods used to monitor progress is team meetings. Team meetings are highly collaborative and serve many purposes, including information sharing and team development. Depending on the nature of the project, these meetings may be focused exclusively on sharing the status of tasks underway. It is also possible for status discussions to lead to team planning. The individuals who participate in these meetings vary depending on many factors, such as development methodology in use, organizational culture, project complexity, and status of the overall project.

Project teams typically develop different reports for different stakeholders. Stakeholders who have a high interest and high power/influence will receive more information, more frequently (recall the stakeholder power/interest grid presented in Chapter 4). Depending on the priority and duration of the project, the reporting frequency could be daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

There are three different types of project reports:

1. Status reports – where the project stands at a specific point in time
2. Progress reports – what the project team has accomplished during a certain period
3. Forecasts – future project status based on current project status and known trends

A common and simple approach to sharing project status is the stoplight. Red means the project will not accomplish its objective(s). Yellow means the project may not accomplish the objective(s). Green means the project is on track to accomplish its objectives.

Exhibit 7.1: Example of a project status report utilizing stoplight symbology.

 The status of a project is subject to change very quickly because unexpected risks can surface at any moment and new opportunities may be discovered.

Project leaders will develop a reporting format that meets the needs of the stakeholders and quite likely includes a combination of the above types.

Experienced project leaders know that project success is much more than delivering on time, on budget, and within the defined scope and quality parameters. This is not enough. A project that fulfills those parameters while failing to address the organizational need that led to its initiation would be considered unsuccessful. This is an extremely important concept to understand as it widens the lens of what project leaders monitor and how they respond to change. This leads to an important distinction – qualitative versus quantitative monitoring.

Source: Seneca
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