What project controls actually does: plan, measure, forecast, act

Transcript

Power Infrastructure Upgrade (fictional): a $50.0 million, 24-month substation and transmission line upgrade.

⚠Fictional training data. Not a real project, utility or company.

Project controls is the set of practices that keeps a project's schedule, cost, scope, risk and change visible and under management. The project manager makes the decisions. Project controls makes sure those decisions are based on facts, and made early enough to matter.

It works as a repeating cycle. First, plan: set a baseline for what will be done, when, and for how much. Second, measure: record what has actually been done and spent. Third, analyze and forecast: compare actuals with the baseline and predict where the project will finish. Fourth, act: recommend corrective action, and run every change through change control so the baseline stays honest.

On our Power Infrastructure Upgrade project, the baseline says the work will take 24 months and cost $47.5 million, with $2.5 million of contingency on top: $50.0 million approved in total. By the end of month 10, the plan called for $17.2 million worth of work to be done. That's the planned value. The team actually completed $15.8 million worth of planned work, the earned value, and spent $17.0 million to do it.

Every dollar spent has produced about 0.93 dollars of planned work. That ratio is the cost performance index. If that efficiency continues, the project will finish at about $51.1 million, which is more than the entire approved budget, contingency included. The question that matters isn't who caused it. It's what the project manager should decide now, while there are still 14 months left to act.

That's the core of the job: turn data into an early, honest forecast, and make sure change goes through a controlled process. Scheduling, cost control, earned value and risk analysis are the tools that make each step of the cycle work, and they're what the rest of this academy teaches.

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