Controlling & Monitoring

Project Control

• Monitoring and controlling involves regularly measuring progress to ensure that the project is meeting its objectives and addressing current business needs
• The Project Manager and other staff monitor progress against plans and take corrective action when necessary
• Things to monitor and control are scope, cost and schedule

Scope creep

• Scope creep is gradual addition of new requirements to original
  specification
• If the changes are not controlled through change control, quality, budget and schedule can be affected
• Some causes include:
  • Requirement not clearly refined at the beginning: Make sure sufficient information is gathered before project executes
  • User/stakeholder requirement changes: Customer and stakeholder should sign off on the scope documents which state what are the deliverables and no additional or change are permitted
  • New technology evolving: Discuss about the technology and determine if it is necessary to change

What happens when scope creep happens?

• It might cause delay in the overall schedule due to the additional work
• It will affect the cost due to the additional work

Prevention action

• To prevent scope creep from happening
  • Monitor work closely
  • Ensure the original scope is defined clearly right from the start (E.g. Project charter, scope statement)
  • Have proper procedure to control change request

Corrective action

• If scope creep does happen in the end, corrective action
  includes:
  • Investigate how the scope creep occurred and
    take steps to prevent it in future
  • Decides whether to continue or undo what
    has been done

Scope change control

• To prevent scope change we need to have
  change control
• A change control process includes:
  • Identification
  • Evaluation
  • Notification
  • Document and implementation change

Identifying change

• Change request form from customer/stakeholder has to be submitted to Project Manager
• Information provide includes
• Requestor information (E.g. Name, department)
• Date of request
• Problem encountered (E.g. Report generated by
  program not detail enough)
• Suggested solution (E.g. Specify the additional
  requirements needed)

Evaluate change

• Once the project manger received the change request, her/she has work with the team members and other necessary parties to evaluate the request
• Factors to consider when evaluating the impact of the change:
• scope - increased?
• schedule - delayed?
• cost - increased?
• risk - due to increased complexity?

Notification

• Based on the evaluation, the decision can
  be to accept or reject the change
• The result of the change has to be
  communicated to affected parties as that
  they are aware

Documentation and implementation

• Changes has to be documented and the tasks required to implement the change has to be updated to the project plan (SOW, WBS, schedule plan)

Schedule control

• Sometimes schedule has to be changed
• change in duration of tasks due to delays or inaccurate estimates
• change in scope
• Schedule control achieves the following:
• track if tasks are completed on time
• if tasks are delayed, what will be the impact and will it affect the total project time (E.g. A task on the critical path)

What happens when there is delay?

• To effectively manage a schedule, project management must make sure that tasks are completed on time
• What happens when the tasks take longer than expected?
• To deal with such situation, the following must be done
• Schedule updates (What is the progress of the project?)
• Corrective action (What to do when there is a
  delay?)
• Lesson learnt (How it can be prevented in future?)

Schedule updates

• Schedule updates refers to the updating of the completion dates and progress of the tasks
• The purpose of schedule updates is to allow the project management and everyone else in the team to know the progress of the project
• A Gantt chart used for schedule planning previously can also be used to indicate the actual vs planned schedule

Schedule tracking using Gantt Chart



Schedule corrective actions

• If a task on critical path is taking longer than expected, action needs to be taken
• Crashing is a technique for shortening the time needed to complete a task by providing more resource
• For example, if John requires 10 days to complete a task, we can pay another person to help John so that the task can be completed in 5 days
• Fast tracking involves doing activities in parallel rather than in normal sequence
• Instead of waiting for Task 1 to be totally finished before starting Task 2, start Task 2 and Task 1 together

Lesson learnt

• Preventing task from having similar delay in future
• Analyze the changes to determine what causes the deviation and steps to be taken to prevent such cases in future (E.g. Put more manpower for particular task)

Cost control

• Funds that are being allocated during the
  budgeting stage are being spent as the project
  progresses
• There is a need to keep track on the spending to
  prevent overspending
• Cost control involves
• Revised cost estimates
• Corrective action
• Lessons learnt

Revised cost estimates

• As actual costs are spent and compared to the baseline, deviation can be detected
• Deviation is often due to change in scope or schedule
• If there is any deviation, impact to the other aspects of project plan should be reviewed (E.g. Not enough fund for developing certain features of the product in the later stages)
• The revised cost estimates has to be updated to the cost baseline when there is a big difference between the actual spending and the cost baseline set

Corrective actions

• When there is a cost deviation such as cost overruns but the difference is minimum
• If there is a huge overrun and there are no additional fund available, there will be a need to have a trade-off such as reducing functions or quality

Lesson learnt

• Major deviations need to be analyzed to determine the cost to prevent future situation from happening

Quality control

• Quality control is the process of reviewing project results to confirm compliance with the defined requirement and appropriate changes to remove causes of unacceptable quality

Quality tools

• Quality tools and techniques are used to determined compliance with minimum standard
• Testing/Inspection
• Pareto Diagram
• Control charts
• Statistical sampling
• Flowcharting
• Trend analysis

Testing

• Testing is required to ensure that product is working as expected
• There are two types of testing
• Product testing (internal)
• Acceptance testing (external/customer)
• Product testing
• Unit testing – Individual component of the system e.g. Reporting
  module, web server, database server
• Integration testing – Testing the functions when the individual components are combined
• Acceptance testing
• User Acceptance Testing (UAT) – Testing by the end-users
• Factory acceptance testing – testing done at the site of development
• Site acceptance – testing done at the customer site

Pareto diagram

• This principle assume that 80% of defects are
  actually caused by only 20% of the problem
• Thus, by finding out the few problems that causes most of the defects, quality can be improved
  drastically
• Helps to prioritize problem areas

Statistical sampling chart



Trend Analysis



Quality control actions

• What should we do when there is a quality issue?
• Rework
• Process adjustments
• Acceptance

Documentation Quality

• Documents are product during the difference stages of the project
• User document
• Help-desk training


• Quality control activities also include ensuring the quality of the project-related documentation