Project Control

Control, the act of reducing differences between plan and actuality, is the final element in the planning-monitoring-controlling cycle. Monitoring and comparing activities with plan, and reporting these findings is to no avail if actions are not taken when reality devi­ates significantly from what was planned. In fact, the simple act of noting and reporting discrepancies may motivate the actions required to correct the deviations. When it does not, however, active control is needed to bring performance, schedule, cost, or perhaps all three, back in line with plan. Control has the primary purpose of ensuring that the project is in compliance with its objectives. Particularly in large projects with a wealth of detail and constant hubbub, it is all too easy to lose sight of these three fundamental targets. Large projects develop their own momentum and tend slowly to move out of hand, going their own way regardless of the wishes of the PM, top management, and even the client. In large projects early control is crucial!

Control is one of the PM’s most difficult tasks, invariably involving both mechanis­tic and human elements. Sometimes humans, through action or inaction, set in motion a chain of events that eventually results in a discrepancy between actuality and plan. Sometimes events occur that affect people in a negative way, leading to undesirable dis­crepancies. Anger, frustration, irritation, helplessness, apathy, despair, and many other emotions arise during the course of a normal project and affect the activities of the pro­ject team members who experience them. It is over this welter of confusion, emotion, inertia, fallibility, and general cussedness that the PM tries to intervene and exert control.

Control is difficult for a number of reasons, perhaps the most important of which is that it involves human behavior. The problem that the human element poses for control by the PM is that it invariably involves the project team—a “we” group rather than a “they” group—a group we perceive as our friends. Yet it is difficult to criticize friends, which is exactly what control does. Control means interceding in an activity that some­one has been doing and “correcting” it, thereby implying that someone was at fault and doing something wrong.

Another reason that control is difficult is that problems are rarely clear cut, so the need for change and redirection is also fuzzy. In fact, most discrepancies uncovered by a monitoring system turn out to be “messes,” in the terminology of Russell Ackoff[1]. A “mess” is a general condition of a system that, when viewed by a manager, leads to a statement that begins “%#@*&+#!!!” and goes downhill from there. The discovery of a mess leads the PM to suspect that there is a problem(s) affecting the project; and in situ­ations as complex as a project, identification of the real problems is difficult. Determining what to control raises further difficulties. Indeed, it is rarely clear if someone took an incorrect action, and thus needs to be corrected, or if the discrepancy (mess) was simply the work of an unkind Mother Nature.

1. Purposes of Control

There are two primary purposes of control: the stewardship of organizational assets and the regulation of results through the alteration of activities. So far in this chapter we have primarily discussed the latter in terms of the plan-monitor-control cycle, and we will spend the majority of the rest of the chapter on this purpose also. Thus, we take a moment to discuss the first purpose, conserving the organization’s three primary assets: physical, human, and financial.

Physical asset control is concerned with the maintenance and use of the project’s physical assets. This includes the timing as well as quality of maintenance being con­ducted on the assets. For example, it is important to conduct preventive maintenance prior to that last stage of the project life cycle known as the Last Minute Panic (LMP), even though the precise timing of the LMP is usually unknown. And, of course, physical inventory must be received, inspected, certified for payment to suppliers, and perhaps stored prior to use. All project assets, even the project coffeepot, project team’s couch, and project library, must be controlled. Most important, however, is the set of physical equipment that was charged to the client that must be delivered to the client at the end of the project.

The stewardship of human resources primarily involves controlling and maintain­ing the growth and development of the project team. Fortunately, projects provide a particularly fertile environment for cultivating humans, given that each project typi­cally offers a unique professional experience over a short duration. These experiences, more than performance appraisals and reports, foster growth and development of project team members.

Last, financial control involves stewardship of the organization’s expenditures on the project, including both conservation of financial resources and regulation of resource use. Most accounting tools used for projects are excellent in this area of control: current asset controls, project budgets, capital investment controls, audits, and even representa­tion on the project team through the project accountant. We cannot overemphasize the importance of proper conformance to both the organization’s and the client’s financial control and record-keeping standards. Recall that all project records, plans, budgets, evaluations, and so on are an organization’s “assets” and are subject to the most rigorous control and preservation.

Nevertheless, the PM is invariably more inclined toward the use of project assets than to their conservation. Although most PMs view the conservationist mindset as that of the fabled librarian who is happiest when all the library’s books have been collected from readers and are neatly sorted in their proper places on the bookshelves, PMs must realize the dual, albeit conflicting, roles they have assumed. These antithetical attitudes must, however, be merged and compromised in the PM as best they can.

An example of the use of extensive controls to help produce a successful project was the Metro Turnback project for San Francisco (Wu and Harwell, 1998). This massive, high-risk, 11-year underground construction project was conducted in the high-traffic, downtown region of the city. To keep the project on schedule and within budget, an extensive and complex Management Plan and Control System was devised. To illustrate the depth of this monitoring and control system, its subsystems are listed here: Project Code of Accounts, Cost Code of Accounts, Control Budget, Trend Program, Scope Change Log, Monthly Contract Cash Flow Schedule, Contractual Milestone Summary Schedule, Construction Schedule, 3-Week Rolling Construction Schedule, Quality Control and Quality Assurance Program, Contractor’s Nonconformance Report, and Corrective Action Report.

For an example of what happens when control is inadequate, we turn to Cincinnati, Ohio, to quote from The Cincinnati Enquirer of January 21, 2000:

Guesswork, management neglect and possible criminal conduct allowed city engineers to report as completed $15 million in street repairs that were never done, a city audit says.

. . . In annual reports between 1991 and 1997, the city’s Engineering Division reported that a total of 818 lane miles [of street repairs] has been completed at a cost of about $65 million.

The internal audit found that only 460 lane miles have been completed, costing $50.5 million. (Cincinnati Enquirer, January 21, 2000, p. 1)

The issue has been assigned to limbo, still in a “blame someone else” state. It dis­played certain aspects of low comedy with the city’s Engineering Division, City Council, and City Manager all involved in the matter. There is little doubt that inadequate and unaudited reporting coupled with incompetent control by managers on several levels over 7 years all contributed to the fiasco.

Source: Meredith Jack R., Mantel Jr. Samuel J., Shafer Scott M., Sutton Margaret M. (2017), Project Management in Practice, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 3th Edition.