Execution, Monitoring, and Control
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
• Develop a staffing and teamwork plan for single and multiple projects.
• Strategize influence management and motivation using the POWER model.
• Use the WBS Dictionary and other tools to monitor multiple work packages on multiple projects.
• Create a project baseline, including a tracking Gantt chart and cost baseline.
• Identify key issues in scope, change, and quality that might affect your projects.
• Determine when it is necessary and appropriate to create a new baseline and plan your project.
• Define key terms and concepts in Earned Value Project Management (EVPM).
Estimated timing for this chapter:
| Reading | 50 minutes |
| Exercises | 1 hour 10 minutes |
| Review Questions | 10 minutes |
| Total Time | 2 hours 10 minutes |
EXECUTE, MONITOR, CONTROL
A major part of the project management process for both single and multiple projects takes place during the initiation and planning stages. The bulk of the project’s work, on the other hand, is performed during the execution phase. As the project manager or the manager of the project managers, you are usually a participant in the execution, but you are necessarily part of the work that surrounds project execution: monitoring and control.
At every level in the project hierarchy, from manager of a single work package to manager of a single project to manager of a set of projects, the issues of execution, monitoring, and control apply.
PROJECT EXECUTION
In executing, you perform all the activities necessary to accomplish the work of the project. You assign project activities to team members, help the team work together effectively, manage and resolve problems, and coordinate with project stakeholders.
Even though you’re now in the execution phase, you’re not completely finished with planning; you’ll continue to plan even as the work is being performed. When a project involves a high level of unknowns, as is common in such areas as R&D and new product development, your initial plan may have gotten quite sketchy after the first few tasks, because the output of those tasks determines what will happen subsequently. As a result, you may find yourself continuing to develop and refine the plan by adding new information as you obtain it. At the same time, the project manager is deeply involved in the parallel step of monitoring and control: tracking and adjusting the project. The wise project manager also thinks about the eventual closing out of the project, and begins to assemble the necessary puzzle parts to allow closing to run smoothly.
Executing the project is the part of project management that is most like regular management. You delegate work to team members, motivate them to perform well, lead the project in a specific direction, and build an environment that allows people to achieve their best results. While this chapter addresses some specific technical skills unique to managing (either single or multiple) projects, many of the skills are the same ones you need to be effective in any managerial role: the skills of people management and team building, both officially and unofficially. Developing and building these skills is the work of a career, not of a single self-study course. You’ll find a selection of resources and recommendations in the back matter of this book; all of us at AMACOM strongly encourage your continued self-development in whatever form it may take.
Building the Project Team
The project team consists of the people whose work you need to get the project done. The team normally consists of a few people who are in the project pretty much from start to finish, and others who have specific technical roles to play. Once the roles have been satisfied, those people normally leave the project team. The team members may or may not be people who report to you in a traditional supervisory sense; some team members may have higher organizational rank than you.
When considering team members, determine availability, normal reporting chain, and any issues, such as potential responsibility conflicts.
Exercise 10-1
Building the Project Team
Using the information Resource Assignment Matrix you prepared in Exercise 9-2, make a list of the people you’ve identified as being necessary to complete the work of the project. For each, complete the form below.
Intact and Part-Time Work Teams
The project team can be either an intact work team or a part-time team. An intact work team consists of people who are on the project full time, start to finish. Because they have few outside responsibilities during the life of the project, their time and effort are largely controllable by the project manager. On a part-time work team, members of the team have other projects and work responsibilities, and work on the current project only on a part-time basis (with occasional spurts of full-time effort).
It’s much easier to build teamwork in an intact work team than in a part-time work team. However, projects tend to be set up based on the practical nature of the work, not on the ideal circumstances for effective teamwork. Nevertheless, if you are the project manager, you must build a spirit of willing collaboration and cooperation to ensure that the job will be done well.
Teamwork in an Intact Work Team
Let’s look at the easier situation first: building a team in an intact environment. First, the circumstances and nature of the work have to permit this choice. Second, you may or may not have significant power to choose the team members you prefer. Third, even if the majority of your team has an intact structure, it’s common for at least some members to connect on a part-time basis.
Projects fail in the execution stage for three basic reasons:
• People on the team do not know the goals, the individual roles, or the performance expectations for the project.
• People get bogged down in the act of working with one another because they do not possess the necessary skills.
• Rivalries, politics, and personalities (and previous histories) generate conflict.
• Teamwork and team building are frequently misunderstood.
Teams are necessary in organizations because they are a critical tool to get the work done. As a project manager, you must understand fundamental team-building techniques and strategies in order to achieve your project goals. Some of the most important skills of working together are not systematically taught to people. To work together in a business setting, people must know how to run a meeting, how to conduct group decision-making and problem-solving, and other group processes.
A good team involves people who bring disparate personality styles and sets of strengths/weaknesses to the situation. Consider using such tools as Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to help each team member understand the others and understand that the goal is to get people to operate with mutual respect, rather than necessarily to like each other or even enjoy working with each other.
Teamwork in a Part-Time Work Team
If all or some of the members of the team are not part of an intact work team structure, you still have to accomplish the same goals, but you have fewer tools to work with.
When people have their attention divided among multiple projects, you simply cannot assume that they have enough focus on your project to know what the expectations are. Telling them verbally a single time just doesn’t cut it. Do tell them, but also write them, e-mail them, and put it in your calendar that you have to remind them when it comes to the timing issues. Your firm persistence is the most valuable tool you have.
Personality conflicts are often less an issue when people don’t have to work closely with each other, but a long-standing rivalry or dislike can rear its ugly head in the middle of your project. Keep alert for these situations, and show up to remind people what they have to do and when—remember, it’s about the work, not about the personality. Know that you will often have to settle for minimum performance from people because your project simply doesn’t have a high enough priority, and if it does, it’s still not an absolute priority.
The better your own skills in areas such as meeting management and conflict resolution, the better you’ll perform in this situation. One common complaint of project managers in the part-time team environment is, “I schedule a meeting, but key players just don’t show up!” That’s because meetings have an unfortunately deserved reputation as time-wasters, and busy people will attempt to dodge them if possible. When you do them right, you’ll find that in time the word gets around and people are much more likely to be cooperative.
If you are in the common position of having to aid other people on their projects while managing your own, make sure you provide support to others on a timely basis if you want to influence them to complete your work on time. Keep good calendar records and practice effective time management.
Think About It …
How will you ensure that the team works together effectively? What issues are likely to occur? How will you resolve conflict? How will you ensure balance with other assignments and responsibilities team members may have? How will you motivate and influence behavior?
Supervising People Who Don’t Work For You
It’s very common for a project manager not to be the official supervisor of the entire project team. This is true because projects are temporary, requiring a variety of people to be pulled under one roof for a limited amount of time. Because they have homes to return to after the conclusion of the project, and because their expertise may be needed on a variety of projects, it makes little sense to reorganize the entire table of organization for this limited purpose.
The good news is that official supervisory authority isn’t that great to begin with. While you may possess the technical power to fire somebody, in practice, you must get the cooperation and signoffs of people who outrank you in your own hierarchy and of outside groups (such as human resource or legal) to get it done. Supervisors quickly learn that official power is much less important than leadership—the ways we get people to choose to do what it is we want them to do.
The discipline of influence management, which is a practical and completely legitimate form of office politics, is another of the core competencies of good project managers. Influence management is, as the name suggests, the art and craft of gaining influence over others, which requires power.
The POWER Model
There are six sources of organizational power that reinforce one another to give you expanded influence to get the work done, shown in Exhibit 10-1.
Role Power. Your official role in the organization, along with special delegated assignments, committee and staff positions, and so forth, gives you certain influence. Even those who do not report to you in a formal sense normally have to show at least a minimum respect for your organizational role. Notice that this power is given to you by others, and is capable of being counter-manded.
Respect Power. A powerful source of influence management is the respect others have for you, because of your track record, your special knowledge, your insight and intelligence, and your personal integrity and honesty. While respect power takes time to build, it’s often much more powerful than organizational role in influencing the behavior of others.
Rhetoric Power. Skill in the arts of communication is a source of influence and power. A clearly written memo setting forth goals, roles, expectations, and time requirements for a specific task is harder to ignore than a badly written and confusing one. Your personal ability to negotiate, to sell, and sometimes even to plead are ways to influence others to get the work done.
Resources Power. You often have control of certain resources—your own time and priority list, if nothing else—that others require to get their work done. While in the long run it’s ineffective to deny others in order to blackmail them into cooperating with you, it’s legitimate to go the extra mile for those who are willing to go the extra mile for you in return.
Relationship Power. Who you know and what kind of relationship you have with them is another traditional source of power. This doesn’t mean only cultivating relationships with people higher than you; quite the contrary. Notice the power held by someone who has a staff-level friend in every department. Good manners and a friendly smile are effective influence management tools available to anyone.
xhibit 10-1
The POWER Model
Adapted from Enlightened Office Politics, page 142, by Dobson and Dobson ©2001. Used by permission of the publisher, AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, New York. All rights reserved. www.amacombooks.org
Reason Power. Depending on the priority of your project, you may get additional power from it. Reason power comes from the “Why?” of your project. Under normal circumstances, you couldn’t evict a vice president from his or her office, but if you’re the acting fire marshal and there’s a fire, your reason for giving orders is so high that everyone will tend to obey you. Faking a higher level of priority for your project is normally a bad idea, but when your project has significant priority and legitimacy, it’s completely appropriate to use that power in support of accomplishing your ends.
Managing Tasks and Deliverables
While managing your team processes, you must ensure that the right tasks are completed in the right order. Give work assignments in writing, and keep a log. Follow up at regular intervals. Insist that people tell you in writing when tasks are completed—it keeps them focused. You’ll find that your WBS, network diagram, Gantt chart, and other traditional project management tools help you do this. Review the WBS Dictionary/Task Analysis process; you can use the forms you develop to help ensure you’re on top of a multiplicity of tasks. This is important enough when there’s only one project to manage; when managing multiple projects, some sort of task control system is vital.
Don’t forget to involve your customer in the process. If you complete some project deliverables before the project is completed, consider turning them over early and get written confirmation that they are acceptable — this can add to the customer’s confidence in your performance as a project manager.
Keeping on Schedule, on Budget, and on Spec
There is a feedback loop between the project phases of Execution and Controlling. By staying on top of the team process and ensuring that task assignments are given and received in written form, you are providing operational emphasis on the three project management goals: on time, on budget, and on spec.
Of course, there are reasons other than poor performance for missing deadlines, budgets, or performance targets. Perhaps the job had a high degree of inherent uncertainty, so the original estimate wasn’t that solid. Perhaps unforeseen and even unforeseeable problems cropped up. Perhaps outside priorities interfered with your planned acquisition and utilization of project resources. Whatever the reason, your monitoring and control systems will need to pick them up. Based on your analysis, you will then make performance changes that normally require work in the Execution phase, and so you can expect a steady stream of adjustments and modifications.
MONITORING AND CONTROL
Once the project has started, the other major activity of the project manager is monitoring and control. In this phase, your mission is to monitor the project as compared to the original plan, to act to correct deviations, and to manage the scope of the project—including handling required project changes.
While the Executing process is mostly involved with the members of your team, the Controlling process tends to involve people outside your team—stakeholders, customers, managers, contractors—who have their own agendas and interests concerning your project. You’ll find yourself using substantial negotiating skills during this phase as well.
How do you know how you’re doing? By examining actual data compared to performance baselines.
Baselining Your Project
There are normally three performance baselines that you set for your project: the schedule baseline, the cost baseline, and the performance baseline—each reflecting one of the legs of the Triple Constraints.
Time Baseline
The first baseline is the schedule, normally displayed in the form of a Tracking Gantt chart. This kind of chart is built on an existing Gantt chart. The bars you already drew become the plan; now as real information is received, you add a second bar to represent actual performance. Based on this information, you can forecast where you are currently likely to end up.
xhibit 10-2
Tracking Gantt Chart
Exhibit 10-2 shows the Gantt chart from Exhibit 6-5 turned into a tracking Gantt chart. The project is now at the end of day 20 (shown by the dotted black line). Task B, you will notice, took one day less than anticipated; Task C, on the other hand, took one day longer.
The early completion of Task B allowed Task E to begin a day early, even though Task C was late. Task C is not on the critical path, you will remember, and even though its late completion made Task E a day late, there’s no effect on the project deadline.
Of course, we really don’t know what will happen after day 20 of the project, but if the remaining tasks take the planned amount of time, we currently expect to finish one day early.
Exercise 10-2
Preparing a Tracking Gantt Chart
The project is now at the end of its ninth day. Task B took four days to complete; Task C took eight days to complete, and Task D took nine days to complete. Assuming all remaining tasks take their scheduled duration, when will the project finish?
Cost Baseline
The second performance baseline is the cost baseline. There isn’t a standard tool like the Tracking Gantt to display this information. Normally, you’ll use a spreadsheet showing the budget amounts for each task, enter the actual cost when it’s determined, and monitor the variance, if any.
Exhibit 10-3 takes the spend plan from Exhibit 9-3 and shows baseline against real performance.
Performance Baseline
The third baseline is the performance baseline, which normally involves monitoring of the tasks displayed in your WBS to ensure that each is satisfactorily completed. By recording when each activity is completed, you can monitor performance by department, which is a different and often useful perspective, especially on large projects with numerous tasks. You can compare completion dates with targets, but the scheduling baseline has already given you that information. What you want to look at is the project from the perspective of work complete, and in this view you can also see any patterns that are developing within departments or subprojects in time to allow you to act.
Because project subject matter varies so greatly, there isn’t a single standard approach to developing a performance baseline—unlike time and cost.
Managing Risks
As mentioned earlier, there are four parts to an overall risk management strategy, and they start in the planning stage of your project. These are risk identification, risk quantification, risk response planning, and risk response control. Throughout your project you will find it wise to periodically reassess the probability of the risks you’ve identified because events on your project make some risks likelier or less likely. You can then amend your planning and response to deal with them.
xhibit 10-3
Cost Baseline (Plan vs. Actual)
Managing Scope, Quality, and Change
Managing and monitoring the performance baseline tells you if the actual work of the project is progressing properly, and provides you with the ability to measure the level of project quality. It’s not enough to have performed the planning steps: now you have to work the plan. No battle plan, it is said, ever survives contact with reality; although a project is not a battle, much the same thing is true of project management. Change happens.
Even with goodwill on the part of all project stakeholders, projects, as we’ve learned, have a tendency to mutate. Change management is one of the critical functions of the monitoring and control process. Changes can result from plan slippage in the areas of schedule, budget, resources, or performance; from the discovery of previously unknown information during the execution of the project; or because one or more stakeholders wants something different now that the project has begun.
The first category of project changes involves preventive action. Preventive action is taken with the goal of avoiding a problem by changing something in the way the project is managed. This could involve adding time to an activity, adding resources or money, or changing some aspect of performance or method. Preventive action can be designed into an initial plan, or be added to a project underway based on your ongoing risk identification.
Corrective action is reactive: there has been a problem and the corrective action is designed to mitigate or eliminate the damage.
Scope Creep
A change in project scope can be part of either preventive or corrective action, but other changes in project scope aren’t an indication of project problems. They are the result of a change requested by a project stakeholder, either the customer or someone else with an interest in the project. (Adding your objectives onto someone else’s project is a traditional political technique, like attaching a rider to legislation already on the fast track.)
Changing scope isn’t inherently wrong—it may be necessary, appropriate, even desirable—but it is troublesome, because changes in scope normally affect other parts of the project. If someone wants you to do additional work, it’s likely to take additional time, cost additional money, take additional resources, or affect your ability to do another part of the project. Therefore, you need to manage project scope actively. Scope creep is unplanned and unmanaged scope change, and it’s hugely destructive.
Earlier, we stated that the planning portion of a project must include an advance strategy for how to deal with requested scope changes during the project. The strategy was 1) everything in writing, 2) assessed for impact, 3) presented to the decision maker (who may or may not be the project manager), and 4) if approved, implemented—along with other changes to the project.
Beware of the temptation to shortcut the process. This can lead to trouble later, especially if people requesting a scope change verbally minimize what they are really asking for. You want to make sure the entire change is quantified so that the decision-making process will be meaningful.
Change Orders
It is important to decide at the outset who will pay for scope changes. In construction projects, for example, the question of who is financially responsible for each change is a matter of careful contractual negotiation. For each change, the question is whether it was within the original scope.
One problem seen in many organizations is that project managers (who may not be the sales or contract executive on the job) often feel embarrassed or unsure how to ask for additional money for out-of-scope change orders. They accept out-of-scope changes with the goal of customer goodwill.
It may sometimes be appropriate to eat costs that aren’t really your responsibility based on the extent and nature of the customer relationship, but you don’t get the goodwill if the customer doesn’t know the sacrifice you’re making. Provide a “zero cost” change order at a minimum, showing the price you would normally charge, and then waiving it. You may be glad later on that you have earned some goodwill with the customer, because later on you may have to use it.
There are three basic situations that make you think about updating the plan or baseline for a project. These are imposed changes/scope creep, internal changes/variances, and circumstantial/environmental changes.
Imposed changes/scope creep. The baseline of the project consists of the approved original plan plus or minus approved changes. When you have scope creep, your baseline is modified. If the changes are relatively minor, you may not bother to update your baseline information. You can simply eyeball the baseline and interpret what it means.
If the changes are more significant, it will likely be advantageous for you to generate updated plans and new baselines. Another advantage of computer tools in project management is that automation is much easier and much quicker than updating by hand. Changes aren’t completely free of effort, though, so make sure that you will get extra value from an updated plan before spending the time and effort to develop one.
Internal changes/variances. Changes can result from project problems and variances as well as from requested or imposed changes by people outside the project team. Again, ordinary variances don’t automatically require updating the plan or baseline. If you’re a consistent week behind schedule, this is a bad thing, but the baseline will clearly show the variance; an updated baseline will add no new information to help you solve your problem.
If, on the other hand, your project problems have gotten to a point where you have to rethink and replan to get from where you are now to some approximation of where you want to be, updating the plan may be the only technique that will achieve your goals. The old plan no longer measures effectively.
Circumstantial/environmental changes. Your plan always rests upon some basic assumptions—the environmental conditions in which the work will take place. Like all assumptions, these carry certain elements of risk. If it happens that the project environment changes, the original plan and even the original destination may be overtaken by events. In that case, you have to re-think your project, and replanning is probably not optional.
When not to replan. Because updates to the plan and the baseline aren’t free—they take time and effort you could spend elsewhere—our recommendation is not to tackle them lightly. If you’re looking at ordinary variances and the basic direction is unchanged, the original baseline still points you in the right direction and gives you measurements you can meaningfully interpret. Spend your time and energy in more productive activities.
Remember that the presence of a variance by itself is not proof you have a problem; it’s simply a data point for you to analyze. And also remember that all the information you need to interpret a project probably isn’t on the page in front of you. Your judgment, your understanding, and your insight into the entire project are your most valuable tools.
EARNED VALUE PROJECT MANAGEMENT (EVPM)
The Earned Value method of project management (EVPM) is an advanced tool available for you as a project manager. Most often used in the construction industry, EVPM offers a powerful set of analytical and forecasting tools to measure, monitor, and predict cost and schedule variance. You can use EVPM on both single and multiple projects and programs.
A complete discussion of EVPM is beyond the scope of this self-study course, but all project managers need to be familiar at a minimum with the high-level concepts and terminology of this approach. Earned Value starts with three measurements:
1. Planned Value (PV). The Planned Value of the project is also known as the Budgeted Cost of Work Scheduled (BCWS). It’s how much the plan says you should have spent to achieve the work that should have been done by a given date.
2. Actual Cost (AC). The Actual Cost of the project is also known as the Actual Cost of Work Performed (ACWP). It’s how much you have spent by a given date to accomplish the work you actually did by that date.
3. Earned Value (EV). The Earned Value of the project is also known as the Budgeted Cost of Work Performed (BCWP). It’s how much you should have spent to accomplish the work you actually got done by a given date.
Various formulae based on these three items provide you with extensive tools to analyze your performance. Here are a few of the more popular tools:
• Schedule Variance (SV) = PV – EV. How much work did we get done based on how much we planned? If we should have completed $1,000 worth of work by today but have only done $800, we’re $200 behind schedule.
• Cost Variance (CV) = EV – AC. In accomplishing $800 worth of work, we may have spent $900. In that case, we’re also $100 over budget.
• Schedule Performance Index (SPI) = EV/PV. How are we doing against the schedule? If we’ve done $800 worth of work when we should have done $1,000, then our SPI is 80 percent. We’re running 20 percent behind schedule.
• Cost Performance Index (CPI) = EV/AC. If we’ve spent $900 to do $800 worth of work, then our CPI is 89 percent. We’re running 11 percent over budget.
The forecasting power of the Earned Value can be easily seen. If we’ve completed 20 percent of a $5,000 project and have an SPI of 80 percent and a CPI of 89 percent, that’s a disturbing trend. It suggests the actual cost will be the budget divided by the CPI or $5,000/.8, or $6,250. It may be worse—if the schedule overrun continues, multiply the CPI times the SPI to get a factor of 71.2 percent and divide the planned budget by that factor to get $7,022.50.
In project execution, the manager of single or multiple projects must ensure the work is done, build and manage a team (often including people who don’t report to the project manager), and strategize to maximize influence and motivation, especially when resources are spread over multiple projects.
The elements of influence management can be described using the POWER model: a project manager’s influence and effectiveness is a function of the role, respect, rhetoric (communications skills), resources, relationships, and the reason or purpose for which the project manager seeks power.
Task management is the process of monitoring the work to make sure it is properly done, and to identify potential slippage. In monitoring and control, the manager of single or multiple projects monitors three baselines: time, cost, and performance. For time tracking, project managers often use a tracking Gantt chart; for cost tracking, an “S”-curve chart showing planned and actual cumulative expenditures is common. Change is inevitable on projects; uncontrolled and unmanaged change is often fatal to projects. Implement a change control system to ensure changes are in writing, analyzed, and properly decided. Replan when the original project baseline is no longer informative.
The Earned Value Project Management (EVPM) method considers the planned value, the actual cost, and the earned value of work performed to date, and uses the information to forecast problems at early stages of a project.
Review Questions
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1. Revise the project baseline: (a) if there is a variance of more than five percent in the Schedule Performance Index and Cost Performance Index. (b) when the old baseline no longer provides meaningful insight into current performance. (c) whenever a change order is approved. (d) whenever a major milestone is achieved. |
1. (b) |
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2. The primary purpose of a project baseline is to: (a) provide clear boundaries to team members. (b) monitor actual performance compared to the plan. (c) ensure quality of deliverables. (d) control scope creep. |
2. (b) |
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3. The Earned Value of a project tells you: (a) how much money has actually been spent. (b) whether the project will finish on time. (c) how much you should have spent for what you actually accomplished. (d) how much you actually spent for the work you should have completed. |
3. (c) |
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4. A good tool for managing a number of tasks and work packages at the same time is known as the: (a) Earned Value Project Management. (b) Tracking Gantt Chart. (c) Critical Path Method. (d) WBS Dictionary. |
4. (d) |
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5. Your ability to communicate effectively and persuasively is known as: (a) Relationship Power. (b) Reading and Writing Power. (c) Rhetoric Power. (d) Reason Power. |
5. (c) |