Engineering Project Management

10Monitoring the Progress of Your Project (Part I)

Once you have created a great project plan, you can start work on your engineering project. You now need a set of tools and mechanisms to allow you to monitor what is going on, and to determine if progress is as expected (or not!). In this chapter, I show you how to assess progress on schedule and cost. I also introduce you to the principal financial measures that your company will use to measure the business performance of your project.

10.1 Monitoring Progress Via Updated Predictions to Schedule and Cost

In Chapter 7, we learned to build an initial version of an activity network for our project, and then, using the data in that activity network, to develop an initial version of the estimate of the cost of our project. These activities are done before the project starts, as part of your proposal to the customer, and those same data are also used in order to get permission from your company to submit your proposal to the customer.

After you win and start work, as the project progresses, you will of course learn much more over time about your project. This new information needs to be used to improve the estimates for schedule and cost. And of course, there will be actual changes in status of the project – progress or lack of it, and also changes to the requirements and to the design – that will affect these predictions too.

Therefore, on most large engineering projects, we do such an update to the schedule and to the cost ...