Chapter 10
Introduction
How is it possible to specify a control system without understanding what aspects of a project are subject to measurement and how the measurement is to be accomplished?  Monitoring is collecting, recording, and reporting information concerning any and all aspects of project performance that the project manager or others in the organization wish to know.  The primary concern of this chapter is that all parties interested in the project have available, on a timely basis , the information needed to exercise effective control over the project.  The key issue is to create an information system that gives project managers the information they need to make informed, timely decisions that will keep project performance as close as possible to the project plan.

10.1 The Planning-Monitoring-Controlling Cycle
The key things to be planned, monitored, and controlled are time (schedule), cost (budget), and performance (specifications).  
	The planning (budgeting and scheduling) methods proposed “put the hassles up front.”  They require significantly greater investment of time and energy early in the life of the project, but they significantly reduce the extent and cost of poor performance and time/cost overruns. 
	It is useful to perceive the control process as a closed loop system, with revised plans and schedules following corrective actions.  Planning-monitoring-controlling cycle is continuously in process until the project is completed.
	It is also useful to construct this process as an internal part of the organizational structure of the project, not something external to and imposed on it or worse, in conflict with it.

Designing the Monitoring System
The first step in setting up a monitoring system is to identify the key factors to be controlled.  Define precisely which specific characteristics of performance, cost, and time should be controlled and then establish exact boundaries within each control should be maintained.
	The best source of items to be monitored is the project action plan, the set of action plans that describe what is being done, when, and the planned level of resource usage for each task, work package, and work unit in the project.   The monitoring system is a direct connection between planning and control.  The action plan furnishes the key items that must be measured and reported to the control system, but it is not sufficient.
	Monitoring should concentrate primarily on measuring various facets of output rather than intensity of activity.  PM’s are interested in achieving results.
	One of the most common errors made when monitoring data is to gather information that is clearly related to project performance but has little or no probability of changing significantly from one collection period to the next.
	Therefore, the first task is to examine the project plans in order to extract performance, time, and cost goals.  These goals should relate at various levels, some should relate to the project, some to its tasks, some to work packages, and so on.  Data must be identified that measure achievement against these goals, and mechanisms designed that gather and store such data.

How to Collect Data
	A large proportion of all data collected take one of the following forms.

1.	Frequency counts – A simple tally of the occurrence of an event, often used for complaints.

2.	Raw Numbers – Dates, dollars, hours, physical amounts of resources used, and specifications are usually reported in this way.

3.	Subjective Numeric Ratings – Subjective estimates, usually of a quality, made by knowledgeable individuals or groups.

4.	Indicators – when system performance cannot be measured directly, it may be possible to find an indirect measure or indicator.  Ex. Response to change.

5.	Verbal Measures – quality of team member cooperation, morale of team members, or quality of interaction with the client.
After data collection has been completed, reports on project progress should be generated.  These include project status reports, time/cost reports, and variance reports among others.  Monitoring can serve to maintain high morale on the project team as well as to alert team members to problems that will have to be solved.
	The purpose of the monitoring system is to gather and report data.  The purpose of the control system is to act on the data.

10.2	Information Needs And The Reporting Process

Everyone concerned with the project should be appropriately tied into the project reporting system.
	Lower level personnel have a need for detailed information about individual tasks and the factors affecting such tasks.  Report frequency is usually high.  For senior management levels, overview reports describe progress in more aggregated terms with less individual task detail.  Reports are issued less often.  In both cases, the structure of the reports should reflect the WBS, with each managerial level receiving reports that allow the exercise of control at the relevant level.
	Frequency of reporting should be great enough to allow control to be exerted during the period in which the task is scheduled for completion.  Also, reports should be available in time to be used for project control, the timing of reports should generally correspond to the timing of project milestones.  Reports should be scheduled in the project plan.  They should be issued on time.  The nature of the monitoring reports should be consistent with the logic of the planning, budgeting, and scheduling systems.

Benefits of detailed reports delivered to the proper people on a timely basis
•	Mutual understanding of the goals of the project
•	Awareness of progress of parallel activities and problems associated with coordination among activities
•	More realistic planning for the needs of all groups of people working on the project
•	Understanding the relationships of individual tasks to one another
•	Early warning signals of potential problems and delays in the project
•	Minimizing the confusion associated with change
•	Faster management action in response to unacceptable or inappropriate work
•	Higher visibility to top management
•	Keeping the client and other interested outside parties up to date on project status

Report Types
•	Routine – issued on a regular basis, varies depending on what level.

•	Exception – directly oriented to project management decision making and should be distributed to the team members who have prime responsibility for decisions.  They may be issued when a decision is made on an exception basis.

•	Special Analysis – used to disseminate the results of special studies conducted as part of the project or as a response to special problems that arise during the project.

Meetings
A few simple rules can remove most of the onus associated with project meetings.
•	Use meetings for making group decisions or getting input for important problems.  Avoid “show-and-tell” meetings, also called status and review meetings.
•	Have preset starting and stopping times as well as written agenda.
•	Be prepared, do your homework prior to the meeting.
•	If you chair the meeting, take your own minutes.
•	Avoid attributing remarks or viewpoints to individuals in the minutes.
•	Avoid overly formal rules and procedure.
•	If a serious problem or crisis arises, call a meeting for the purpose of dealing with that issue only.

Common Reporting Problems
•	Too much detail, unnecessary detail usually results in reports not being read, also prevents the project team from finding the information they need.
•	Poor interface between the project information system and the parent firm’s information system.
•	Poor correspondence between the planning and the monitoring systems.  If the monitoring system is not tracking information directly related to the project’s plans, control is meaningless.

The Earned Value Chart
Three variances can be identified on the earned value chart
•	Time Variance - difference in the time scheduled for work that has been performed (STWP) and the actual time used to perform it (ATWP).
•	Cost/Spending Variance - difference between the amount of money budgeted for the work that has been performed (BCWP) to date and the actual cost of that work (ACWP).
•	Schedule Variance - difference between the budgeted cost of the work performed (BCWP) to date and the cost of the work scheduled to be performed to date (BCWS).

Milestone Reporting
See examples of such a report on pages 463-465.

Computerized PMIS (Project Management Information Systems)
Real projects are often extremely large, with many hundred and thousands of tasks and hundreds of thousands of work packages.  Diagramming, scheduling, and tracking all these tasks is clearly a job for the computer. The current trend in PMIS is integration of software, including spreadsheets, databases, word processing, communications, graphics, and other such capabilities.  There are some misuses of these systems or inappropriately applied.  
•	Managing the PMIS rather than the project
•	Computer Paralysis - loss of touch with the project and its realities
•	PMIS Verification - PMIS reports may mask real project problems, be massaged to look good, or verify that real problems exist, yet are not acted upon.
•	Information Overload - too many reports, too detailed, could overload managers and effectively hide problems.
•	Project Isolation - PMIS reports replace useful and frequent communication between the project manager and top management, or even between the PM and team.
•	Computer Dependence - Pm or top management wait for the computer reports/results to react to problems rather than being proactive and avoiding problems in the first place.
•	PMIS Misdirection - certain project subareas are overmanaged and other areas receive inadequate attention.

Large PMIS Capabilities
The entire project must be well coordinated and tightly controlled if performance requirements are to be achieved and schedules met.  Five phase approach;
1.	Scope out the work in major work phase diagram, a summary WBS is the result.
2.	Definition of the work package in more detail.  Determining exactly what must be done (the WBS), when, who will do it, and how much will it cost
3.	Baseline input data requirements are specified, this includes estimates of activity duration’s, budgets, labor requirements, constraints, etc.
4.	Ongoing monitoring where input data on project status are collected through system modules for schedules, costs, cash flows, and so forth.
5.	Definition of output management reports for the control function.  This consists of defining the data analyses that must be conducted and report fromatting and generation.

Small PMIS Capabilities
Explosive growth in PMIS’s has occurred in the area of small to medium sized PMISs intended for microcomputers.  There are now over 500 packages on the market and the number continues to grow.  The book describes two software packages pluses and minuses.  Needs have been identified by a two surveys conducted on project managers to list some of the basic attributes these packages need to have.
•	Friendliness - novice user, clear concise manuals, help screens, tutorials, etc.
•	Schedules - Gantt charts mandatory, automatic recalculation with updates of times, costs, and resources.
•	Calendars - Either job shop and/or calendar dates are necessary.
•	Budgets - Ability to include a budget for planning, monitoring, and control.
•	Reports - Individualizing of report formats was considered desirable.
•	Graphics - Ability to see the schedule and interactions.
•	PERT/CPM Network - The depiction of the Network was deemed desirable
•	Charts - Charts for responsibility and histograms
•	Migration - Ability to migrate other software systems such as databases, spreadsheets, word processing and other applications.
•	Integration/Complexity - level of one key does it all integration.

Five Areas of PMIS Internal Capabilities
•	Project Planing - consideration should be given to the number of activities per project, the use of various calendars and time units, data recording & organization, time estimation and graphics generation.
•	Resource Management - resource types, number of resources per project, sharing of resources, resource leveling, scheduling resource load, resource updating.
•	Tracking/Monitoring - critical path analysis, subnetwork analysis. Early warning systems, baseline & actual schedule updating and display, resource updating.
•	Report Generation - project status summaries, computer assisted report generation, data evaluation, resource list and histograms, schedule lists, task detail, updating or report periods, resource detail.
•	Decision Aiding - number of capabilities, what if analysis, expert system capability, multi-project tracking with cross analysis.

A General PMIS Selection Process
1.	Establish a comprehensive set of selection criteria, considering the five areas above
2.	Set priorities for the criteria, separating must have items from nice to have and not-needed items.
3.	Conduct a preliminary evaluation of the software packages relative to the criteria using vendor supplied data, product reviews, and software surveys.
4.	Narrow the candidate packages to three to obtain demos of each, evaluating the vendors at the same time in terms of interest, software maintenance, and support.
5.	Evaluate each package with a standard project typical to your current and projected future needs.
6.	Negotiate on price, particularly if you are making a volume purchase or contemplating a site license.

The balance of this chapter shows some typical outputs available through Microsoft Project, pages 473-480.