Monitor/Controlling & Closing the Project - Discussion 3

Specific Learning Topics:

· Understand Project Control Metrics - EVM

· Learn about Project Milestones & Gantt Charts

· Discuss importance around Project Quality

What's due:

· Read the below concept overviews

· Read applicable readings as posted in the Week 3 folder

· Complete the discussion (main post)

Project Control Metrics:

As project teams execute projects, one important thing that the team must do is carefully monitor and analyze progress to ensure success. Control measures allow us to recognize the status of the project at any given time during the life cycle. For example, such control measures tell us where we stand with the budget at any point in time or what milestones have been reached.  Earned Value Management (EVM) is a critical control tool that jointly considers combined time, cost, and performance. Be sure to read the article in the Week 3 folder and videos below to further learn about the numerous terms related to EVM including: Planned Value (PV), Earned Value (EV), Schedule Variance (SC), Cost Varience (CV), Schedule Performance Index (SPI), Cost Performance Index (CPI), and more...

Here are two videos related to Earned Value:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bhJnjsETUk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U313VMm2r7Q

Milestones & Gantt Charts:

Project milestones help identify critical check-in points or tollgates within a project. They commonly exist before moving onto the next major deliverable. Typically the project team will present their work to the customer or other team members to gain consensuses that the project deliverables are meeting the set objectives. Agreement flags the completion of the milestone and progression to the next effort of work. Note often Project Managers just offers a list of milestones and tracks whether they were completed as part of the project status report; however, this method alone is not sufficient to understand if the project is trending appropriately on-time or on budget. As just because you may have completed 5 out 8 milestones, you may be six months behind schedule and $50,000 over budget. Thus, that is again where the power of EVM comes into play.

Gantt charts compliment Milestones and Project Schedules. They offer a visual representation of the project activities, relationships of other activities, and calls out milestones typically as a diamond. See example below.

Project Quality:

Project quality should be consistently considered through the monitoring and controlling processes (as remember how quality can be sacrificed based on the triple constraints from Week 1). Quality should be defined by the customer of the project as they are ultimately taking ownership of the project after it completes. There are many approaches to tracking quality; including Deming's 14 Points for Management, Juran's 10 Steps to Quality Improvement, or Crosby's 14 steps to Quality Improvement. Take a moment to google a couple of these to learn about how they can be integrated with managing quality in a project. Large projects may even embed within them a Quality Assurance policy and team; which includes formal activities and processes that attempt to ensure that deliverables and decisions meet the required quality level.  Quality audits, which offers an independent evaluation of how a project is conforming to quality, may also occur. Finally, there are many tools that project teams can use to monitor quality. Some of these tools include: Cause-and-Effect Analysis, Pareto Analysis, Histograms, Scatter Diagrams, Control Charts, and more. 

Review the following video on quality tools:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFPF0TIFG-4

PMI - Earned Value Article

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/earned-value-management-systems-analysis-8026

Click the above link to read an article from PMI as related to Earned Value Management.

EVM Calculations Explained

https://edward-designer.com/web/pmp-earned-value-questions-explanined/

Click the above link to read an article about calculating EVM.