As part of the development and publication of our Advanced Project Control Handbook, we have also developed a number of Golden Rules specifically for Project Control. Our White Paper 2016-11 \’Project Value Delivery’s Project Control Golden Rules\’. details these rules.
The main objective of Project Control is to enable the Project Manager and the Project Sponsor to take decisions derived from an accurate current knowledge and understanding of reality, with the aim to reach a successful Project outcome. We have derived 14 Golden Rules covering Project Control activities which constitute the core of the capability for Project Control to become a trusted strategic advisor to the Project Manager:
- Accountability: Covering the entire Project scope, designated ‘Scope Owners’ take ownership for their Schedule, Cost and Risk (including update, forecast and action-taking). The Project Manager is ultimately accountable for the entire Project. Project Control supports and challenges ‘Scope Owners’ and raises issues of consistency and consequential impacts of events.
- Alignment with clear Project Objectives: establishing clear detailed Project Objectives is an essential pre-requisite as it will inform the build-up of the Project baseline, monitoring system, and strategies.
- Urgency of building Control at Project Start-Up: Very significant effort has to be devoted at Project start-up to establish a full baseline including breakdown structure, together with efficient data generation, flow, exchange protocols and compilation with the aim to minimize later data crunching efforts and leave sufficient time to analysis.
- Candid Reflection of Reality: The Project Model must reflect candidly the reality of the Project progress status and associated re-forecast, however difficult or annoying this reality could be.
- Immediacy principle: It is essential to reflect in the Project Model significant new variances as soon as their occurrence is known (e.g. internal or Client’s instruction to proceed), at least in terms of order of magnitude, even if their exact final value has not been fully assessed.
- Keep space for Forecasting activities: successful Project Control minimizes actual data gathering and crunching, and leaves sufficient time to forecasting activities.
- Weak Signals and Consequential impacts identification: as part of its consistency assurance role, the Project Control Manager’s key role is to keep abreast of Weak Signals and to detect possible consequential impacts of changes or variances and needs to ensure that they are understood and communicated.
- …
Find these Golden Rules and the others in our White Paper 2016-11 \’Project Value Delivery’s Project Control Golden Rules\’.
Find all these principles of Practical Project Control exposed in a comprehensive manner in our new Handbook, Practical Project Control Manager Handbook (now published – click on the link to see it on Amazon!)