Module 12
Project Control
In the preceding chapters we learned how to plan (budget and schedule) and organize projects. The last chapter explored reporting systems. This chapter develops the idea of using the original plan and the data reported to us to "control" the project. Remember the first "law" of project management, "No major project was ever installed on time, within budgets, with the same team that started it. Yours will not be the first." But we want to be the first, so when we receive monitoring information, we want to use that information to bring the project back to specifications, back on budget, back to schedule, or back to whatever combination of those is behind.
Rarely none of those is behind, in which case remember the fourth law of project management, "When things are going well, something will go wrong." If things continue to go well, you might remember that stewardship of your organization's assets is an ethical obligation, and you should consider giving some of the personnel, funding, or office space back to your parent organization. Some PM's would hide these surplus assets against a rainy day. But note I started this paragraph with the word "rarely."
The author gives a mildly theoretical presentation of cybernetic (feedback) control system. He is warning us about overcompensating for an input. Say we have 5 D-9 cats moving dirt for a highway. We are 10% though the job schedule and have moved only 7% of the dirt. We might compensate by buying 2 more D-9s and hiring two more operators. That might put us back on schedule quickly. But perhaps only one D-9 would have been sufficient to bring us back on schedule before the job is 40% complete. Or we might notice that the first 10% of the dirt is the most difficult to move and we are liable to catch back up without any new equipment. Just because the numbers you receive from the monitoring indicate a problem does not mean a great change in operations is required. It does mean you, the PM, need to carefully examine the situation and take action that is needed. Later in the chapter your author goes into a little of the human relations and management problems association with "controls." Often the production problem is related to human relations or the abilities the project personnel, either as individuals or their capacity to work together as a team. Motivating or changing personnel is very difficult, even if you have management support to do so.
Your author spends some time with "critical ratios" and some other methods of trying to quantify monitoring results. Engineers like this because it gives us a number. And we like numbers. Greater than 1.0 is good, less than 1.0 is bad. Here your author qualifies this approach; these are just more management tools that give a skilled PM information about where to look for problems and possibly insight into how they might be fixed. They also give program managers, who have many projects under them, tools to decide which projects they need to look at in more detail.
Your author distinguishes go/no-go controls from simple milestones, and post-controls from the information in the next chapter about auditing. It's not bad information, but cybernetic controls are the most commonly used and important.