Part 6 of 10-The Book that Most Impacted My Career-Excellence in Engineering

 

This blog will cover sections of Excellence In Engineering by W.H. Roadstrum, 1967, and relate them to Project Management Institute’s Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK).

In Chapter 4 of Excellence In Engineering, Roadstrum identifies Project Controls as three elements – Scheduling, Monitoring and Controlling.   As discussed in Part 5, the first of three elements of Project Controls was presented – Scheduling.   In this Part, the Monitoring practices will be highlighted.   

As I have learned through a career in project management, keeping the team focused on the project vision, mission, objective, and benefits, which are identified and committed to through the Project Charter, is an essential function of the project leader.   But an equally important part of the business of project management is to advise the team on performance to project metrics. 

 Roadstrum builds on the work flow and scheduling practices to define the practices for monitoring the baseline schedule within established milestones, dates and goals.

Good Engineering Practices for Monitoring

1. Follow and monitor performance (time, cost, technical progress) on a regular basis.

2. Include all contributors in the monitoring process so they are also “self-monitoring”.

3. Plan at least general alternatives for each principal contingency.

4. Keep the goal and its broad alternatives clearly in mind.

Poor Engineering Practices for Monitoring

1. Because of preoccupation with novel and challenging areas of the project, allow unmonitored tasks to run far off schedule.

2. Because of failure to identify critical items, do not follow these or provide alternatives.

3. Wait for other people or the turn of events.Raise no questions on schedule progress until critical deadlines have been missed.

4. Mistake proper rate of expenditures for adherence to technical schedule.

5. Allow an old schedule to become so outdated as to be useless.

PMBOK – Fifth Edition Chapter 6, regarding Project Time Management, covers scheduling and schedule control tools and techniques common for monitoring of the project schedule, and the respective performance indicator (s), which are shared across schedules and estimates under the project controls function.

Section 6.6.2 identifies tools and techniques for monitoring and updating project schedules using subject matter expertise and software.    The project team can make improvements in achieving scheduled dates, planned progress goals, and in creating recovery plans for projects with poor performance indicators.    The actions may be created by several means:

• Network Analysis – This involves showing where various activities converge or diverge with dependent activities.

• Critical Path Method - This involves using the predecessor and successor connections with activities where the estimated duration has fixed start and end dates and contingency in scheduled duration with other activities.  

• Critical Chain Method - This involves using buffers in activity durations to account for limited resources.

• Resource Optimization – This involves using resource leveling and resource smoothing to adjust the duration of activities and align with available resources.

• Modeling  - This involves  conducting trial and error changes to the baseline to detect potential schedule risks and to improve schedule efficiency and production effectiveness.

• Leads and Lags - This involves adjusting the activity relations, such as start-to-start, finish-to- start, and finish-to-finish, to establish modified connections in the predecessor/successor relationship, such as start Task B 60 days prior to finish of Task A.

• Schedule Compression - This involves  Crashing - shortening activity duration with corresponding increases in resources, and Fast Tracking - re-sequencing work activities to increase overall progress rate and to shorten the project duration.