- Blog Project Management Project Monitoring Project scope
- 27 Dec 2023
Ensuring Project Success by Taking Actionable Insights from Lead Indicators
The Conventional Project Monitoring
How do we ensure that projects are completed as scheduled and within the defined budget. We monitor and control the project schedule, cost, quality, safety etc during the execution phase to ensure the same. How effective is the monitoring & control?
Every project execution is a journey from start milestone to finish milestone. We have defined where we want to reach and when we will reach there. Once this side is defined, we will plan how to reach there and what resources we need to reach there. Also, we define intermediate stops or milestones for gauging the pace and consumption of the resources in reaching these milestones. What are the potential obstacles in reaching there and how much it will impact the time and resources?
Is weekly reporting project status adequate to take corrective / preventive action?
Conventionally we make project decisions based on the progress reports provided by the project control team on regular defined intervals, this is on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Is this serving the purpose, especially when the projects cannot afford to have activities with large floats. Imagine that Project Manager’s decisions are based on a bi-weekly progress report and there are many activities with less than 15 days duration with no or single-digit total float. By the time the information on the delay has reached the PM the golden hour to save the project has elapsed and we can only do a damage control exercise rather than take action to initiate a recovery.
In a recent webinar poll, 49% of the participants indicated that they are reporting the project progress statistics every week, 22% said they are reporting bi-weekly and 20% said they are reporting every month.
Poll results from the 'Mastering EPC Project Success: Real-time Monitoring & Control of Key Lead Indicators' webinar.
Will this help in taking decisions at the right point of time to save the project from slipping from its defined plan?
Is the percentage progress capture accurate: Activities in a project schedule are updated by the planning engineer individually with the start date, and progress percentage and then the project is scheduled to forecast the remaining activities and the project completion. The progress update is subjective as the percentage achieved is a calculation from another progress measurement system and there is no guarantee that the truth is captured from the source. Also, the update of the schedule is done only once a week, bi-weekly, or a month, and the delays are made visible to the project management team only when these updates are done. Also, progress measurement and schedule updates are happening discretely, and no seamless integration between them.
Project Health Indicators – Lead & Lag Indicators
Projects are conventionally monitored using lag indicators such as progress achieved vs planned, cost spent vs planned cost, number of incidents, number of NCRs registered, etc, and the outcome of the project is predicted by analyzing the lag indicators. This is like reading the newspaper which provides information on the event that happened yesterday and with no control over today and tomorrow.
What can we do beyond measuring the progress or capturing the events in monitoring and controlling the projects to ensure that all the defined objectives are met. Any information provided to the project management team should aid in making correct decisions at the right point of time. Management needs insight to the project status through visual indicators which will provide hindsight on what is the way forward in completing the project like.
- Problems expected on the way (Risk)
- Expected cost to complete (ETC)
- Milestones expected to be delayed etc
The indicators shall be visually appealing to catch the attention of the person. These indicators shall be able to provide detailed analysis in the form of drill downs and also should be classified based on criticality. For example, if a certain number of milestones are expected to deviate from the plans or the extent of variances are not within the affordable limits etc.
Health Indicators shall provide details about the
- Productivity trends
- Quality performance
- Number of near misses at the site
- Good and bad quality observations etc
In a single screen so that at one look the project team knows where we are heading to. The most important thing is that this information should be available at the right time, that is now rather than after a week or a month. For this, the systems that provide this information shall be capable of capturing the required data in real-time and from the source. Also since project teams might be using different legacy systems to process information, such as an ERP system for managing the procurement process or payroll software for managing the employee’s salary, etc the monitoring system used shall be able to seamlessly integrate into these systems as every bit of information is important for providing the way forward for the project as any information missed out shall result in a forecast which may not be true and will lead to wrong assumptions.
In a recent webinar poll, 48% of the participants stated that the accuracy of data is of primary importance and 44% are of the opinion actionable insights are the requirement of having project lead indicators.
Poll results from the 'Mastering EPC Project Success: Real-time Monitoring & Control of Key Lead Indicators' webinar.
Correspondence between stakeholders is a good indication on the performance of the project. Tools are now available to analyse the sensitivity of the correspondence between the stakeholders and provide a sensitivity index to the management to understand how the stakeholders view the status and potential outcome of the project.
Workfront visibility
Progress measurements shall not just provide on the lead indicators for the project it shall also provide clear visibility to the project management team on the Workfront available for execution. The engineering progress shall indicate clearly how much work front is cleared for concreting, structural erection, or pipe fabrication rather than just indicating the number of drawings released against planned or percentage progress, which does not make any sense to the construction team. Similarly, tracking of procurement activities shall give a clear indication on the material availability for construction and shall highlight the potential delays, if any so that resource usage can be optimised. Measuring construction progress combined with the engineering and procurement data updates shall give clear visibility of the work released for execution.
Collaborative platform
Organisations use different applications for scheduling, material procurement, finance management, etc and the management team has to browse through these different applications to know the status of the project, or the project control team must fetch data from different sources, consolidate and provide it in a concise form. This is time-consuming and may lead to wrong analytics and interpretations.
The project team will be able to get visible lead indicators for the project only when all the project data including the progress measured, plan data, resource, and cost data integrated into one platform and analysed. This will also provide clear work front visibility and the correct forecast of the project completion and cost.
Project monitoring has grown beyond the measurement of project activities and reporting the status periodically to having real-time actionable insights to project managers by analysing defined KPIs and through lead indicators by 360-degree collaboration with all stakeholders leveraging the latest technologies including Artificial intelligence to predict project outcomes.
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