A few weeks ago in a post, The Phases of Project Controls [1], we suggested the current ‘second phase’ of project controls started in 1957 with the development of CPM and PERT scheduling software and has continued through to the present time driven by the development of various dynamic project control tools.
Exploiting the capability of these tools, project controls has developed into a sophisticated process with a focus on detail, needing highly specialized experts to run the software. However, the result is far from optimal for organizations that require consistency in project delivery. There seems to be three main trends in the way projects are managed:
Traditional major project management. These projects tend to have large, complex, highly detailed controls systems, focused on cost and schedule, often integrated into an EVMS or IMS. However, despite the ever-increasing levels of detail in the tools, project failure rates remain unacceptably high. Some of the problems include:
- A focus on detail over usefulness
- A refusal to allow flexibility
- A focus on history
- A focus on cost over performance
- Delayed reporting
- A focus on allocating (or hiding from) blame
- The need for layers of tools experts.
Agile and adaptive project management. The widespread adoption of management philosophies such as Agile and Lean have abandoned the traditional approach described above and are focused on short term iterative planning within some overall project roadmap.
The project management agnostics. There is an increasing number of projects where the people running them have simply given up on using project controls. Most still report cost as a historical fact but little else:
- A surprisingly large number of traditional projects do not have a maintained CPM schedule
- A large number of smaller projects have reverted to using simple bar charts
- Large sections of the agile IT industry are moving away from project management, adopting concepts such as flow and progressive delivery
- The #No Estimates movement suggests just getting on with the work is the best way forward, no need for plans.
Increasing numbers of organizations and projects are simply abandoning this concept; many others pay lip-service to controls and buy a schedule or other plans from a consultant, send it off to the client, then ignore the plan and get on with the work.
The above overview is very general. There will be hundreds of individual areas of excellence in specific organizations and thousands of well-run projects. However, these exceptions cannot hide the trend in project failure and the breakdown of project controls. There is a need for improvement. You cannot control the past, and cost is a symptom of past performance.
What do you think?
Read more on our post: https://mosaicprojects.wordpress.com/2024/06/28/problems-with-project-controls/ [2] or,
For more on PC-3.0 see: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PC-3-00-Overview.php [3]