The project management monitoring and controlling starts as soon as a project begins. Monitoring and controlling project work is the process of tracking, reviewing, and regulating the progress in order to meet the performance objectives. It is the fourth process group in Project Management. From the perspective of Knowledge Management Area, this involves the management tasks, such as tracking, reviewing, and reporting the progress of a project. Moreover, this process is majorly concerned with:
Measuring the actual performance against the planned performance
Assessing performance to determine whether or not any corrective or preventive actions are indicated, the status is reported and/or appropriate risk response plans are being executed.
Maintaining an accurate, timely information base concerned with the project output and its associated documentation till project completion
Providing information to support status reporting, progress measurement and forecasting
Providing forecasts to update current cost and current schedule information
Monitoring implementation of approved changes as they occur
Inputs
The inputs to the process of project monitoring and controlling are:
Project Management Plan (2nd process of this knowledge area)
Schedule Forecasts (Project Time Management)
Cost Forecasts (Project Cost Management)
Validated Changes
Work Performance Information
Enterprise Environmental Factors (EEF)
Organizational Process Assets (OPA)
Tools and Techniques
The tools and techniques for this process include:
Expert Judgement
Analytical Techniques
Project Management Information Systems
Meetings
Output
Following are the outputs of monitoring and controlling project work:
Change Requests
Work Performance Reports
Project Management Plan Update
Project Document Update
Analytical Techniques
There are different types of analytical techniques that are applied in project management to forecast potential outcomes based on possible variations of project or environmental variables and their relationships with other variables. Some of the analytical techniques, which are most commonly used, are:
Regression Analysis
Grouping Methods
Casual Analysis
Root Cause Analysis
Forecasting Methods (e.g., time series, scenario building, simulation, etc.)