Project controls is a set of tools and processes that help manage projects through measuring, forecasting and improving project performance. It adds an important dimension to project management by providing a complete system for managing cost and schedule. When these important aspects of a project are under control, projects finish on time and on budget.
To deliver strong project performance, your project controls processes should employ certain best practices. Each of these concepts produce the best results when they work closely together. Their interdependence drives consistent project outcomes.
1. Planning and standardization
A successful project—of the large capital engineering and construction variety that our organization focuses on anyway—can't begin without detailed plans, an implementation schedule and tracking tools. Teams should anticipate and schedule each activity, with milestones that include clear expectations and a possibility for built-in incentives. Skipping this step is a common cause of cost and schedule overruns.
Standardization should factor into the planning process. Standardized tools and templates help team members create consistency across projects. Consistency, especially at the beginning stages of a project, creates clear and measurable steps to track success, simplify analysis and replicate successful projects.
2. Documentation and communication
Project controls owns documentation and communication across the initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and closeout phases of a project.
A project environment is dynamic. Teams must keep documentation current to stay on track toward the project goal. Various stakeholders, managers and project team members may need the same information, with different details to meet varied expectations.
When everyone works from the same data, communication can focus on facts rather than interpretation. An integrated enterprise project controls solution enables team members to operate from the same pool of information.
Standard, formal procedures for documenting discussions and other communications also provide important historical insight for decision making. Recording information creates a reference trail that sidesteps or resolves miscommunication and mistakes.
3. The living forecast
Once a project begins, forecasting is that critical discipline that tells us where we think the project costs and schedule will end based on what we know today. There are many methods, formulas and applications for developing a forecast. However, all of them strive to identify when and where corrective action may be needed.
Given that, a living forecast seeks to have semi-automated forecast adjustments occur regularly. The idea is for every project in the portfolio to have an up-to-date forecast every period, where the adjustments are auditable. Frequent, timely forecasting gives teams the lead time to act before problems compound. Discovering that corrective action is needed now rather than when a forecast is updated at the end of a quarter (or longer) can be the determining factor in whether anything can be done to address the root cause of the change.
4. KPIs that add insight
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measures used to evaluate performance related to operational goals. They link directly to enterprise strategy and give team members important information for project completion and success.
In addition to the tried and true KPIs of project management, project controls must also include KPIs that add an enhanced level of insight. Specific KPIs that add actionable insight to project controls include:
Predictability Index: Predicting project outcomes early is a key to a project's ultimate success. Predictability indices measure a project team's ability to predict cost and performance. These two indices help measure predictability: Normalized Cost Timeliness (NCT), which measures forecast timeliness; and Cost Predictability (CP), which provides information about the accuracy of forecasts.
Earned Schedule (ES): An enhancement to Earned Value Management—ES provides cost-based features to the management and control of schedule performance. ES can improve performance analysis and prediction.
5. Proactivity
Teams must solve problems and resolve issues proactively, course-correcting before time and resources go to waste. Proactive control of a project has effects on budget, time, quality and human resources.
KPIs are an indispensable tool for of a project, providing close oversight of the measurables and ongoing results. Active KPIs provide insights that allow team members to manage a project proactively to avoid process mistakes and/or manage unexpected challenges before they derail the project. This proactive approach helps avoid mistakes and miscommunication and provides a decisive plan of action for resolution.
6. Integration, automation and AI
Enterprise project controls solutions allow businesses to integrate data quickly, making information available and secure and creating a single source of truth for schedules, budgets, expenditures, timesheets, invoices and all data that affects the progress of the project.
The right integrated solution also opens the possibility for automation. This results in a lower rate of human error, while saving time and money by reducing the need for labor-intensive manual tasks. More accurate insights arrive sooner — teams decide faster and act with greater proactivity (see above).
AI builds on that same foundation. Because a single source of truth gives AI clean, connected data to work with, it can surface patterns a manual review would miss: flagging cost and schedule trends before they breach a threshold, drafting forecast adjustments for a project controls team to review and answering plain-language questions about portfolio performance in seconds. The result is a shift in where teams spend their time, moving from compiling and reconciling data to interpreting it and deciding what to do next.
The right tools for project controls
The endgame is all about successful projects. Modern technology offers the solution by providing project management platforms that incorporate project controls best practices.
With the right tools working 24/7, your staff, management, stakeholders and anyone who touches the project will have everything they need to produce successful projects again and again.
Octave Sequence Enterprise (formerly EcoSys) provides planning, tracking, measurement and predictive indices that enable team member communication, proactive responses to challenges and effective forecasting of project success. Contact Us to see it in action and learn how Sequence Enterprise can help you incorporate these best practices into your own project controls.