Table of Contents
Introduction
“Project Controls and Management Systems are central to effective project execution.” 1
– Construction Industry Institute
One of the biggest challenges for enterprise organizations when they embark on large Cap-Ex projects is the deviation that emerges between their cost estimates and forecasts and the actual costs that arise over that project’s lifecycle.
Deviation and Cost Overruns
Very quickly, that deviation translates into significant cost overruns, late delivery, possible fines and even project cancellation. All of which results in loss of revenue and reputational damage.
Nor is the problem of curbing deviation and preventing cost overruns limited to large Cap-Ex projects. It’s a challenge every business faces each time they embark on a new project. This is what Project Controls have been devised to help address.
What are Project Controls?
Project Controls are a set tools that allow you to track costs and schedule to ensure your project comes in on time and on budget. They do this by forcing you to systematically follow a set of procedures and practices that ensure that all the relevant stakeholders are kept permanently up to date about precisely how each project is progressing, so they can take corrective action wherever and whenever it’s needed.
Project Controls in Action
The processes that project controls provide you with enable you to organize and analyze all the data generated by your project, and to then use the insights they produce to ensure your project is delivered more quickly and more efficiently.
Crucially, it’s a continuous set of processes that monitor the project’s progress at each stage and continue throughout the entire project lifecycle, beginning with:
Planning
They give you the framework to develop the work breakdown structure (WBS) by breaking the project down into small, more manageable tasks. This will enable you to establish baselines and benchmark performance against milestones, which can then be easily viewed visually as graphs or Gantt charts.
Budgeting
By integrating your budgets with your schedules, your resource management and all of the other activities associated with your project, project controls give you and your senior management team visibility into when and where any issues arise in relation to costs and forecasting. So prompt, remedial action can be taken to mitigate any deviation that arises.
Change Management
Cost overruns and delays are the result of problems that began as small, minor issues that were missed and which then grew into costly, intractable problems. Project controls provide you with a means of precisely tracking any changes to costs as they happen and of continually monitoring the health of your schedules.
Communication
The most important factor when it comes to delivering projects on schedule and on budget is keeping all the relevant stakeholders permanently up to date, and ensuring that everyone is working from the same set of facts and figures.
Project controls give you a set of tools and processes which guarantee everyone is immediately informed of any changes as soon as they happen. While ensuring that your senior management team can easily monitor a project’s progress and take whatever action they deem is necessary.
Cora PPM Project Controls
Cora PPM’s project controls functionality has been designed to address all of the above. It links project controls to estimates, forecasting, approvals, value of work done, risk, schedules, change management, documentation and all aspects of a project’s lifecycle.
All project data roll up to programme views or portfolio views, so senior management can follow a project’s progress in real time using intuitive and dynamic dashboards that present all the data and statistics as graphs or Gantt charts.
You can then take all the sets of data from all the different plants and offices worldwide and consolidate them all into one central chart of accounts. Enabling you to easily understand where your office or plants stand in relation to the organization as a whole, and to put in a request for resources that might be available at other locations.
Cora PPM digitizes and centralizes all your data and documents, organizing them all through the one, central hub while integrating all your systems and software and streamlining your processes. Delivering a fully operational system that provides you with control, governance and visibility across all Op-Ex and large complex Cap-Ex projects. Find out more about our Project Controls Solutions
