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.