Monitoring and Controlling in Project Management

Monitoring and Controlling in Project Management

Introduction

Nowadays, businesses strive to attain a competitive edge that necessitates managers to improve project monitoring and controls. Project monitoring and controlling engages measuring project progress to make sure that the project address the current business needs and meeting its objectives. Monitoring and controlling become essential as it allows the project managers to monitor project progress against the plan, as well as take corrective actions when essential. This paper talks about monitoring and controlling in project management, as well as highlights its importance.

Discussion

Monitoring and controlling a project can be defined as activities or process where a project manager revises, reviews and tracks the activities of a project to ensure the project meets its objectives. Due to the temporary and unique projects' nature, they need proactive mechanism of control. Unlike, an activity where similar activities have been carried out over and again; thus, expectations and habits are stable, a project is essentially not stable. Such processes are unique to the sequence of resources and activities or to the project are merely associated and assigned temporarily with the project, as well as redistributed at the time of project completion. Patterns and habits are not ascertained before everything changes (Soderlund, 2012).

The key outcomes of the monitoring and controlling processes are the implementing project changes and project performance reports. The emphasis for the project management is the project performance analysis to find out whether a change is required for the rest of activities involved in the project to attain the goals of the project. During a project, there are times when a project needs change. Traditional project are more stable as the activities and requirement are relatively well understood and clear. In today's world, projects are usually extreme and adaptive that is not stable which necessitate project managers to bring into play effective monitor and controls. Commonly used tools to monitor and control a project include earned value analysis, critical ratio, PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) and Gantt Charts.

The key tasks of monitoring and controlling carried out as part of project time management refers to schedule control. Project managers often emphasis on schedule control to deliver the project on time as the biggest issue as problems of schedule often leads to conflict relative to other problems. In the project initiation, procedures and priorities are more vital; whereas, the project progresses, particularly in the latter and middle phases of the project, issues of schedule become the key reason of conflict (Obradovic, Jovanovic, Djordjevic, Beric and Jovanovic, 2012).

Another task of monitoring and controlling in the context of the project scope management is the scope control and scope verification. This will allow project managers to deliver key outputs that are accepted by the clients. It is complex and multifaceted to craft a good project scope statement as it at times more complex to minimize scope changes and verify the project scope.

Monitoring and controlling also help project managers to address cost control during a ...