Monitor and Control: Your Project Management Dashboard

An airplane traveling from New York to London is off course most of the time. Fortunately there are monitors and controls in place to constantly make corrections that enable the airplane to consistently reach its destination instead of landing off the coast of Ireland.

The same is true with project management during the execution phase. If you’ve done the proper planning and you follow the plan, you will be heading in the right direction at approximately the right speed. But because of the human factor, you’ll get off course or behind schedule on a regular basis. Your job as project manager should be to carefully monitor and control your project every day. The more immediate the corrective action, the less resources will be squandered.

Your Dashboard

As project manager you should constantly be monitoring the key metrics of your projects status. These are like gauges on the dashboard. By closely monitoring the following elements you can catch issues before they become major problems:

• The attitude and level of cooperation of your team.
• The current expenditures relative to budgeted expenditures.
• The current schedule relative to projected schedule.
• The quality of the work being performed relative to expected standards.
• The quantity of work performed relative to the projected performance.
• The confidence level of the team and stakeholders.
• The continued support of stakeholders for the project.

These should be the pulse that you have your finger on daily.

Monitoring the Budget

Usually the most critical factor in a managed project is the financial budget. Cost overruns can cause panic and over reactions not to mention tarnish the project manager’s reputation. By setting up control parameters in the beginning you’ll be able to spot problems early and correct them quickly.

You’ll do best by setting up cost control procedures that are well understood by your team members. Some general guidelines are:

• Keep a project expenditures file that includes copies of any contracts, invoices or purchase orders used in your project.
• Keep a current total of all expenses to compare to projected expenditures.
• Make sure that you approve any expenditure for your project so that you can confirm the necessary budget for the expense.
• Include a section in the status report for all project expenditures.
• Ensure that each team member is clear on projected hours for the tasks they are assigned.
• Create a required approval process for any hours that exceed these estimates.
• Use budget tracking charts to continually monitor actual vs. budgeted expenses.
• Set appropriate signing limits for team members and managers that control their purchase limits for project approved expenditures.
• Establish control processes with your purchasing department or controller to reject expenditures that exceed budgets.

On project closure, reward team members or groups for not exceeding their budgets. Create a positive association that will motivate them on the next project.

Monitoring the Schedule

Not only do you want to deliver on or under budget but you also want to meet your schedule. Schedule variations need to be responded to not only to get back on track but to determine the underlying problems causing the overrun. Often delays in schedules are symptoms of deeper problems with the project that must be discovered and corrected quickly.

Below are some guidelines to help you monitor schedules and keep them on track:

• Start and end dates for all assigned tasks.
• Timesheets for each team member’s status of activities and events
• Work effort expended relative to scheduled
• The timely reporting of data from team members. Provide positive reinforcement to those team members that deliver timesheet data on time.
• Team member ideas and suggestions to expedite schedule or save money
• Problematic activities based on historical performance.
• Critical path activities. These have a greater effect on the schedule if delayed.
• Any outside vendor activities. These must be monitored more closely than internal activities and corrections must be made more swiftly.
• High risk activities.

(c) 2002-2004 by Bryan Brandenburg

Bryan Brandenburg has published 5 books as well as a number of articles both in print and on the internet. He has published almost 30 software programs both for consumers and business. More information can be found at www.vmmg.net. b.brandenburg@vmmg.net.