An empirical validation of the performance of project control tolerance limits

Abstract

The goal of project control is monitoring the project progress during project execution to detect potential problems and taking corrective actions when necessary. Tolerance limits are a tool to assess whether the project progress is acceptable or not, and generate warnings signals that act as triggers for corrective action to the project manager. In this paper, three distinct types of tolerance limits that have been proposed in literature are validated on a large and diverse set of real-life projects mainly situated in the construction sector. Moreover, a novel approach to construct tolerance limits that integrate the project risk information into the monitoring process is introduced. The results of the empirical experiment have shown that integrating project-specific information into the construction of the tolerance limits results in a higher efficiency of the monitoring process. More specifically, while including cost information increases the efficiency only marginally, incorporating the available resource information substantially improves the efficiency of the monitoring process. Furthermore, when projects are not restricted by scarce resources, the efficiency can be enhanced by integrating the available project risk information.