Controlling projects
Vanhoucke, Mario
Vanhoucke, Mario
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Publication Type
Journal article
Editor
Supervisor
Publication Year
2015
Journal
Journal of Modern Project Management
Book
Publication Volume
3
Publication Issue
1
Publication Begin page
5
Publication End page
5
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Abstract
Completing a project on time and within budget is not an easy task. Project monitoring and controlling systems should consist of processes that are performed to observe project progress in such a way that potential problems can be identifi ed in a timely manner. When necessary, corrective actions can be taken to exploit project opportunities or to bring projects in danger back on track. Th e requisite is that project performance is observed and measured regularly to identify deviations from the project baseline schedule. Th erefore, monitoring the progress and performance of projects in progress requires a set of tools and techniques that should ideally be integrated into a single decision support system. Th e understanding of the basic elements and concepts is a requisite to successfully use and implement the various project control concepts in an integrated project management and control system. Both professionals and academics have spent a vast amount of eff ort in developing tools and methods to effi ciently and eff ectively manage and control projects in progress. Initiated by the early eff orts in the beginning of the 20th century by Henry Gantt (Gantt, 1919), and the development of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique and Critical Path Method a few decades later, a major milestone was reached in the 60s in the Department of Defense of the US government through the introduction of a toolkit that is now known as Earned Value Management (EVM). Nowadays, a variety of methodologies and software tools are available to integrate project scheduling, risk analysis and project control methods into an integrated system, often referred to in literature as " Dynamic Scheduling " (Van-houcke, 2013) or " Integrated Project Management and Control " (Vanhoucke, 2014). Earned Value Management achieved enormous success as a project management and control methodology, but its focus was mainly put on cost management, and almost no attention was paid to time management. Even the earned value gurus (Fleming and Koppelman, 2005) discuss the topic from a price tag point of view and stress in their well-known Harvard Business Review article (Fleming and Koppelman, 2003) that companies rely on some sort of EVM to predict the total project cost in a more accurate way than by simply using straightforward traditional cost accounting methods.
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Keywords
Operations & Supply Chain Management