Effective Project Management

Section K Project Controls

I keep six honest serving men

(they taught me all I knew):

Their names are How and Why and When

and What and Where and Who.

“The Elephant's Child” by Rudyard Kipling

The PBS defines the What of the project and creates a structure from which all the other ‘honest serving men’ are developed. Rudyard Kipling, not being a project manager, had not yet identified two more: What if (the risks) and How Much (the estimate). These are also developed using the PBS and WBS and complete the project management model.

For control purposes, the work packages at level 4 (see Section F Scope) are assigned:

1. A description of the scope of work to be performed
2. A budget for the work derived from the estimate
3. A schedule start and finish dates representing physical accomplishment
4. The person who is responsible for the performance (quality) of the work
5. The resources required – people and materials

Project control is the principle objective of project management since it involves a process for keeping the project to the agreed plan, in order to achieve success. However, as can be seen from the work packages at level 4, it takes five plans to develop a project:

• Scope
• Cost
• Schedule
• Quality
• Resources

These five plans need to be monitored in order to identify when there are any deviations from the plans so that corrective action can be taken.

Monitoring these five plans poses the challenge of what to measure, at what level of detail, and how frequently. However, ...