Construction Project Monitoring & Control

Measuring Work Progress, Earned Value Analysis (EVA), Schedule Updating, Project Crashing

Projects in general, and construction projects particularly, goes through different stages from their inception to their closeout. In the simplest terms, a typical project starts as a “concept” which develops with time going through different phases such as designing, bidding, procuring, executing, and closing. In the absence of applying a proper monitoring and control at each of these phases, one should not expect a successful project. WHY? Simply because construction projects are dynamic in nature. In construction, no project, almost, is executed as planned. For instance, changes are very likely to happen. Moreover, problems related to procurements, resource availability, productivity, financial acquisition, communications, quality, stakeholder engagements, etc. are common in construction project. Such factors can lead to delays in project completion and/or cost overruns.

Thus, to avoid or minimize such pitfalls, it is of extreme importance to apply adequate periodical monitoring and control to your project. “Monitoring” is comparing the project’s actual performance against its planned performance (i.e. baseline), while “Control” is taking preventive and corrective actions to bring the possibly deviated project back on track.

Accordingly, in this course, we will discuss and implement the common practices that are applied to project monitoring and control. The course is divided into five sections that are briefly described as follows:

Section (1): The different project monitoring and control processes (e.g. validate scope, control scope, control schedule, control cost, monitor communications, etc.) will be discussed along with their integration. In addition, a review of project scheduling (critical path method and precedence diagram) will be discussed with example as the project schedule is a crucial prerequisite for applying monitoring and control.

Section (2): The different methods that are commonly used to measure the percentage completion of each “activity” in your project will be discussed with examples. This is followed by understanding and implementing how the percentage completion of the entire “project” can be measured.

Section (3): Measuring the work progress (whether for each activity or the entire project as discussed in section 2) is an important input to apply what is known as “Earned Value Analysis” (EVA). EVA is an integrated time-cost approach that is used to monitor and analyze the project performance with respect to time and cost. Thus, in this section the main concept and objectives of EVA will be discussed. This is followed by understanding three important measures that are to be determined periodically and used to define the project performance. To define the project’s current performance and expected future performance, different analysis tools will then be discussed with examples (i.e. variance analysis, performance analysis, trend analysis, forecasting analysis, and reserve analysis). Finally, important practical concerns and consideration with respect to the validity of EVA will be discussed.

Section (4): Nothing can better represent your project's actual current and expected future time performance like updating your project schedule. Thus, in this section we will discuss the main types of information required and collected when preparing a report to apply schedule updating. This is followed by understanding how schedule updating is carried with applying different examples.

Section (5): The concept, uses, and methods of project crashing (or project acceleration) as a control tool will be discussed. We will understand that project crashing is not necessarily used only for project control, but it can be carried also for other purposes. One of the common analysis methods of project crashing is the “Time-Cost Tradeoff”, which will be also discussed with important practical considerations in this final section.

Best wishes and good luck.