Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

CHAPTER 7

How to Monitor and Control a TPM Project

When you are drowning in numbers, you need a system to separate the wheat from the chaff.

— Anthony Adams, Vice President, Campbell Soup Co.

If two lines on a graph cross, it must be important.

— Ernest F. Cooke, University of Baltimore

You can't monitor and control a project by simply reading reports. You have to walk around and personally check progress.

— Robert K. Wysocki, Ph.D., President, Enterprise Information Insights, Inc.

CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

• Understand the reasons for implementing controls on the project
• Track the progress of a project
• Determine an appropriate reporting plan
• Measure and analyze variances from the project plan
• Use Gantt charts to track progress and identify warning signs of schedule problems
• Construct and interpret milestone trend charts to detect trends in progress
• Use earned value analysis (EVA) to detect trends in schedule and budget progress
• Integrate milestone trend charts and EVA for further trend analysis
• Build and maintain an Issues Log
• Manage project status meetings
• Determine the appropriate corrective actions to restore a project to its planned schedule
• Properly identify corrective measures and problem escalation strategies

The project plan is a system. As such, it can get out of balance, and a get-well plan must be put in place to restore the system to equilibrium. The longer the project manager waits to put the fix in place, the longer ...