Project Control, & How it Fits Into Project Management
If
you’re currently working on a project, whether it’s a residential building,
mall, factory or warehouse, its’ either you hit your target or you miss it.
Whether your target is completing the project on time, or within budget, or
within your quality parameters, according to experts it was found that many
projects miss their target for several reasons, mostly because of the lack of
project control and management. Let’s take a look at how project
control
fits into project or portfolio management.
There Are Subtle But
Vital Differences Between Project Control & Management
According
to the experts, project management and project control are not the same thing,
and without knowing the difference you cannot improve the effectiveness of your
work. At the simplest, project control is and essential part of project
management, and it has to be implemented at every stage from initiation to
closeout.
A project is defined
as “an individual or
collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular
aim”. On the other hand, project management is defined as “the management of a
combination of numerous individual processes, many of which relate to the
subsidiary discipline of project control”.
Now, project control is defined as “the application of processes to
measure project performance against the project plan, to enable variances to be
identified and corrected so that the project objectives are attained”.
To put it simply, project management ensures the successful completion
of a number of different processes, while project control makes sure that those
processes are headed in the right direction. This also helps ensure that
projects are done correctly, and the right projects are chosen in the first
place.
The 3 Vital Questions That
Project Control Exists to Answer
There
are actually 3 vital questions that project control literally exists to answer,
and these are: How much the project will cost? How long the project will take?
and, What value or quality the project will deliver?
In
practical terms, project control is
all about managing project scope, meeting quality requirements, keeping
projects to schedule and budget, managing risks, identifying issues and
ensuring the project’s benefit to the company and its stakeholders.
A
great deal of that comes down to collecting and managing information, finding
trends, forecasting outcomes, progress reporting and actively putting all the
learnings into practice. Without effective control, projects can quickly become
wildly (and brutally) ineffective and expensive.
How Project Control
Fits Into Managing Projects
Now,
how does project control fit into managing projects? In the planning stage for
example, management is planning and outlining your objectives and fundamentals.
Like who needs to be involved, what’s the actual work to be done, and more.
You, and everyone involved in the
planning process, will also need to identify stakeholders and define the
project objectives that set the boundaries for project success. Part of the
success depends on providing a realistic cost and time estimate, both of which
form part of project control.
The development phase is all about
getting the ball rolling, where the team assembles, stakeholders meet and
assignments are planned. Here, project control is key to success, because your
cost estimates becomes budgets and time estimates become schedules, and project
control is responsible for planning and scheduling, cost control and
estimation, as well as cost and schedule risk analysis.
The implementation phase is where
you put your plan into action, and the closeout phase is when you finish the
project. But, just because you’re in the closing phase doesn’t mean that project
control is over!
Why? Because you will still need
to review your total performance, understand the trends and process which led
to success, and look at the strong points as well as the aspects where the
project veered off course.
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