Last Updated on December 17, 2020 by Admin
A project manager needs to ensure that the activities in the project are being carried out in accordance with the approved plan, policy, schedule, budget, quality standard, procedure, and utmost safety. Hence, it is absolutely necessary to monitor the project at regular intervals and adopt suitable controlling measures in order to keep the project on track. Read this article to learn about Project Monitoring, Evaluation, and Control?
Monitoring and controlling is essentially required in any project simply because things don’t always go according to plan no matter how much we prepare and to detect and react appropriately to deviations and changes to the plan.
Even Projects that are well designed, comprehensively planned, fully resourced, and meticulously executed will face challenges. These challenges can take place at any point in the life of the project and the project team must regularly monitor the design, planning, and implementation of the project to confirm they are valid and to determine whether corrective actions need to be taken when the project’s performance differs significantly from its design and plan.
Before understanding the processes in each of the three categories of the project monitoring, evaluation, and control phase in detail, it is extremely important to first differentiate between them.
Monitoring is concerned with the gathering of information and connecting them with the project plans and objectives.
Evaluation is interpretation & estimating the collected information.
Control is the corrective action that is undertaken if the desired result is not achieved. They are three separate actions but go hand in hand as tools for assessing the status and success of a project.
A Feedback Process
Project Monitoring
Project Monitoring refers to the method of keeping track of all project-related metrics including team performance and task duration, identifying possible problems, and taking remedial actions necessary to ensure that the project is within scope, on budget, and meets the stipulated deadlines.
What to Monitor?
At the most fundamental level, we need to track the difference between what was planned and what is actually happening. this includes whether start and finish ate for activities are being met; how cost estimates are working out in reality: weather planned resource requirements are being created.
Hence during this phase, we are to monitor all the parameters and assumption we had considered while planning and scheduling the project, such as:
- Scope,
- Schedule,
- Cost,
- Quality,
- Safety,
- Risk,
- Contract Performance.
Project Evaluation
Evaluation is a systematic and objective assessment of an on-going or completed activity, project program, strategy, Policy, and its design, implementation, and result. as an essential part of the policy development process, evaluation provides a timely assessment of the relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability of interventions.
Project Control
Control uses the monitored data and information to bring actual performance into an agreement with the plan. It Involves comparing actual performance with planned performance and taking appropriate corrective action that will yield the desired outcome in the project when a significant difference exists.
Changes to the original project execution plan are inevitable. Changes will always occur in the project. but we must be able to manage the changes as they occur.
It is an important job of the project manager to identify all changes from the original project scope & Plan and manage them. Managing changes is one of the most challenging areas of construction management and if left unchecked can result in the project run off the track.
