9.

Monitoring and Control

9.1 Introduction

Once the project is underway, attention must be focused on ensuring progress. i.e.
 Monitoring what is happening
 Comparison of actual achievement against the schedule
 Revision of plans and schedules to bring project to target

9.2 Creating the framework

Once the initial project plan has been published, project control is a continual process of
monitoring progress against that plan. If there is a mismatch between the planned
outcomes and the actual ones, either replanning is needed to bring the project back on
target or the target will have to be revised.

Project control cycle

If there is any departure from the plan, the concern for the same is in 4 dimensions
 Delay in meeting target dates
 Shortfalls in quality
 Inadequate functionality
 Costs going over target

Responsibility

The overall responsibility for ensuing satisfactory progress on a project is the role of the
project steering committee or project board. Day to day responsibility is with the Project
manager.

The Reporting structure for medium and large projects is shown below.

Reporting can be
 Oral (or) written
 Formal (or) informal – Informal reporting must be complemented by
formal reporting procedures
 Regular (or) Ad hoc
Assessing progress

Progress assessment is made on the basis of information gathered and collated at regular
intervals or when specific events occur. This information will be objective and tangible.
Progress assessment relies on the judgment of the team members who are carrying out the
project activities

Setting checkpoints

It is essential to set a series of checkpoints in the initial activity plan. The checkpoints
may be i. Regular ii. Tied to specific event / other deliverable

Taking snap-shots

The frequency of information about progress depends on the size and degree of risk of
the project or part of the project under their control
Example: Team leaders need daily report, PM need weekly or monthly reports
(Higher the level, less frequent and less detailed the reporting)

Formal weekly collection of information is preferred as it ensures that information is

provided while memories are still relatively fresh and provides a mechanism for
individuals to review and reflect upon their progress during the past few days.

Project-level progress reviews take place at particular points during the life of the project
called review points or control points

9.3 Collecting the data

Managers will try to break long activities into controllable tasks of 1 or 2 week’s
duration. It will still be necessary to gather information about partially completed
activities and forecast how much work is left to be completed. It is difficult to make such
forecasts accurately. If there is a series of products, partial completion of activities is
easier to estimate. Counting the no. of record specifications or screen layouts produced
can provide a reasonable measure of progress.

In some cases, intermediate products can be used as in-activity milestones

Partial completion reporting

Many organizations use standard accounting systems with weekly timesheets to charge
staff time to individual jobs. The staff time booked to a project indicates the work carried
out and the charges to the project. However it does not tell the project manager what has
been produced or whether tasks are on schedule.

Fig 9.3 shows the report that requests information about likely slippage of completion
dates as well as estimates of completeness.

Disadv.: Asking for estimated completion times and reconsideration of the dates will
deflect the attention of the originally scheduled dates.

Risk Reporting

One way of overcoming the objections to partial completion reporting is to avoid asking
for estimated completion dates but ask for the team members’ estimates of the likelihood
of meeting the planned target date.
The method of doing this is ‘Traffic light method’
 Identify the key (first level) elements for assessment in a piece of work
 Break these key elements into constituent elements (second level)
 Assess each of the second level elements on the scale
Green – on target
Amber – not on target but recoverable
Red – not on target and recoverable only with difficulty
 Review all the second level assessments to arrive at first level assessments
 Review first and second level assessments to produce an overall assessment

Limitation: Traffic light assessment highlights only risk of non-achievement; it is not an

attempt to estimate work done or to quantify expected delays.

Following the completion of assessment forms for all the activities, the PM uses these as
a basis for evaluating the overall status of the project.
Activity that is amber / Red requires further consideration and leads to revision of
project schedule.
Non-critical activities are likely to be considered as a problem if they are
classified as red, especially if their entire float is likely to be consumed.

Example:
9.4 Visualizing progress

Ways of presenting a picture of the project and its future.

Gantt charts: Provides a static picture, a single snapshot
Timeline charts: Shows how the project has progressed and changed through time.

Gantt chart

Devised by Henry Gantt (1861 – 1919) an industrial engineer interested in the efficient
organization of work. This is one of the simplest and oldest techniques for tracking
project progress. It is an activity bar chart indicating scheduled activity dates and
durations frequently augmented with activity floats. The reported progress is recorded on
a chart (by shading activity bars) and a ‘Today cursor” gives an immediate visual
indication of which activities are ahead and which are behind schedule.

A Gantt chart is a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the

progression of time.
It is a useful tool for planning and scheduling projects.
It is helpful when monitoring a project's progress.

Planning and Scheduling Monitoring A Project

A Gantt chart allows you to A Gantt chart allows you to see

assess how long a project immediately what should have been
should take. achieved at a point in time.

A Gantt chart lays out the A Gantt chart allows you to see how
order in which tasks need to remedial action may bring the project back
be carried out. on course.

A Gantt chart helps manage

the dependencies between
tasks.

The slip chart

It is similar to Gantt chart. It provides more striking visual indication of those activities
that are not progressing to schedule.
The more the slip line bends, the greater the variation from the plan.
Additional slip lines are added at intervals and as they build up, the PM will know
whether the project is improving or not.
A very jagged slip indicates a need for rescheduling.

Ball charts
In a ball chart, a circle indicates the start and completion points of activities. The circles
initially have original scheduled dates. Whenever revisions are made, these are added as
second dates in the appropriate circles until an activity is actually started or completed,
when the relevant date replaces the revised estimate. Circles therefore contain only 2
dates, the original and most recent target dates. (or) the original and actual dates.

When the actual start or finish date for an activity is later than the target date, the circle is
coloured red.
When the schedule is on time or earlier than target, the circle is coloured green
This visible record can encourage competitiveness between teams.

This chart is easy to maintain – change only color. In others, the entire chart must be
redrawn

The Timeline

Disadv. (of all the above)

They do not show the slippage of the project completion date through the life of the
project.
The timeline chart is a method of recording and displaying the way in which targets have
changed throughout the duration of the project.
Referring to Fig. 9.8
2 activities are finished by week 6.

Useful both during the execution of a project and as a part of the post-implementation
review.

9.5 Cost monitoring

Important component of project control

A cumulative expenditure chart shows actual vs. planned expenditure.
Cost charts become much more useful if we add projected future costs calculated by
adding the estimated costs of uncompleted work to the costs already incurred.

9.6 Earned value

Based on assigning a ‘value’ to each task or work package based on the original
expenditure forecasts. The assigned value is the original budgeted cost for the item and is
known as the baseline budget or budgeted cost of work scheduled (BCWS). A task that
has not yet started is assigned 0, but when it is finished it is assigned with a value.
The total point credited to a project at any point is called the earned value or budgeted
cost of work performed (BCWP). This can be represented as a value or as a percentage of
BCWS.

Methods of assigning values

 The 0/100 technique 0 at start – 100% of the budgeted value when completed
This method is preferred

 The 50/50 technique 50% of its value at the start – 100% when completed
 This method gives a false sense of security by over-valuing the reporting of
activity starts

 The milestone technique Value is given based on the achievement of milestones

that have been assigned values as part of the original budget plan
this method is appropriate for activities with long duration estimate. It is better to
break that activity into a number of smaller ones.

The baseline budget

First stage in setting up an earned value analysis is to create the baseline budget. This is
based on the project plan and shows the forecast growth

Earned value may be measured in monetary values / person –hours / work-days.

Monitoring earned value

This is done by monitoring the completion of tasks (or activity starts and milestone
achievements in the case of other crediting techniques).

From the earned value chart we can derive the following details
Budget variance
BV= ACWP – BCWS
Schedule variance
SV= BCWP – BCWS
Cost variance
CV= BCWP – ACWP
Performance ratios
cost performance index CPI = BCWP / ACWP
schedule performance index SPI = BCWP / BCWS
A value greater than 1 indicates that work is completed better than planned
A value < 1 means that work is costing more and proceeding slowly

Earned value analysis has not gained universal acceptance due to attitude that a half-built
software does not have any value. But the method is used to tracking the achievements in
a project – measured in terms of budgeted costs of completed tasks or products

9.7 Prioritizing monitoring

Priorities we may assign to decide on different levels of monitoring

 Critical path activities -high priority for close monitoring
 Activities with no free float – delay in such an activity will cause delays in a few
subsequent activities
 Activities with less than a specified float – eg. Less than 1 week free float to be
brought to the attention of PM
 High risk activities – give close attention to them
 Activities using critical resources – high level of monitoring
9.8 Getting the project back target

2 main strategies to be considered to bring a project back on target

1. Shortening the critical path
2. Altering the activity precedence requirements

Shortening the critical path

Speeding non-critical activities will not advance project completion
Work harder and over-time, increase resources
If this does not work, PM allocates efficient resources and swap resources
between critical and no-critical activities
Remember that shortening critical path may make other activities critical

Reconsider the precedence requirements

Ask if the unstarted activities really wait for other activities to be completed.
To overcome precedence constraints, subdivide an activity into a component that
can start immediately and is still constrained as before.
In trying to alter precedence requirements quality may be affected. Also its
important to see how risk is increased.

9.9 Change control

Control of changes is essential because alteration in one document often implies changes
to other documents and system products based on that document.

Configuration librarian's role

 Identification of all items that are subject to change control
 establishment and maintenance of a central repository of the master copies of all
project documentation and software products
 Setting up and running of a formal set of procedures to deal with changes
 Maintenance of records of who has access to which library items and status of
each library item

Change control procedures

 Users perceive change and ask for change requirement passed on to development
staff
 User management (UM) considers the request -if approved, passed to
development management (DM)
 DM delegates a staff to look at the request and report the cost of the change (by
assessing the products that would be affected by change)
 DM reports back to UM of findings, UM decides if to go ahead.
 1 or more developers are authorized to take copies of master products to be
modified
 Copies are modified.
 On completion of new version of product is complete, UM is notified and copies
of software are released for user acceptance testing
  If users are satisfied, they authorise the operational release. Master copies of
configuration items is replaced.

Changes in the scope of the system

The size of the project gradually increases due to changes in requirements by users.
Therefore the scope of the system must be monitored and controlled in terms of SLOC or
function points)