How To Acquire The Value Proposition of Project Control posted by SteveRollins , Group AdministratorFriday, December 16th 2011 @ 8:30 AM (not yet rated)    post viewed 613 times

How To Acquire The Value Proposition of Project Control

Today most organizations that rely on project management are also seeking value from standardization.  How are they doing? These organizations find themselves in choppy waters with their delivery results.  There is something wrong when a project team celebrates delivery completion with team celebration where everyone if back-clapping and whopping it up when the project financials finished 300%+ over budget and took twice as long.  Could it be that they are only celebrating the fact they can go on to something not so dreadful? Anything but this project can often be seen as motivational by the same people who had to endure the force march of a poorly controlled project.

 The connotation of control suggests that results from an event are managed.  This implies that the work and the people who perform the work have understanding of how to achieve work completion and thus progress can be controlled to a successful and normal completion.  Not so fast! This implication is flawed.  In project delivery, project scope is the key input to controlling project progress.  If the scope is inadequate, no level of project control will be sufficient.  The impact of this occurrence will be high levels of work uncertainty.  Project Resource sense of urgency will be altered because the work (task level) is uncertain regarding acceptance criteria. Poor control over resource sense of urgency will result in slippage in project estimates and the project consequently will finish late.

 Satisfactory performance for project control is expected to be on-time, on-budget, and on-scope.  How project resources behave in completing their work in an “as soon as possible” mode allows project control to flourish successfully for projects that follow certain control rules accordingly.

 In a MS Project environment with at least version 2007, project control rules can be successfully applied if the project is applied through Earn Value methods.  This methodology requires the project to cyclically maintain the project schedule in the following weekly manner so that project delivery and financial risk can be properly controlled:

 Resources are defined and loaded to work tasks in a reasonable allocated manner (no more than 120% allocated per week).

1. All work tasks are explicitly predecessored so that the overall project finish date reflects any contraction or expansion from subordinate work events that finished early or late.
2. All resources are labor rated in the Resource Sheet view in the proper monetary hourly rate.
3. That all project resources pertinent to the planned project budget are labor rated.  Other resources that are labor-rated should be zeroed-out so as to not affect project earn value metrics.
4. Project is critical-pathed correctly with appropriate work task slack levels (see table schedule in view command).
5. Project schedule is baselined at the beginning of each calendar month to track monthly project changes.
6. Apply the MS Project Table View for Earn Value to observe “VAC” (Variance at Completion).  VAC is the difference between “budget at completion” (BAC) minus “estimate at completion” (EAC).  Good project control allows for some tolerance in this budget as unexpected project events often occur.

These same control techniques can be applied at the Portfolio level when using MS Project 2007 and above to control portfolio variances in a cyclical manner.

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