4.1 CONTROL A PROJECT – OVERVIEW

Control a project – Overview

The purpose of controlling a project is to understand its current state, have visibility into its future status with cost and schedule forecasts and to initiate corrective and preventive actions.

In the following lessons we will explain monitoring processes and techniques to detect deviations from plan and assess their impact. We will discuss possible countermeasures to address variances. We shall see some fundamental controlling techniques to analyse the value earned by the project and root causes of problems.

The project management plan is an integrated plan consisting of a project baseline and subsidiary management plans. If there is a plan, there must be a controlling process to monitor how well are we doing on that plan, if there are variances – and there are always variances – understand how this affects the project and initiate action as needed.

Therefore, the controlling processes cover all areas of the project management plan.

This is the overview of the lessons about controlling a project:

• 4.2 Control scope
• 4.3 Control schedule
• 4.4 Control budget
• 4.5 Control quality
• 4.6 Control issues
• 4.7 Control changes
• 4.8 Control risks, communications, stakeholders engagement, material resources and procurements
• 4.9 Control phase gates