What comes to your mind when you hear the term “Project Control”? Does taking control or authority over projects come to your mind? Actually, in the world of project management, the term “control” has very little to do with dictating people what to do.
The term “control” is similar to steering a ship. It’s about continually making course adjustments with one main objective in mind: bringing the ship into safe harbour, as promised at the start of the journey. How do you bring the ship to safe harbour? Well, by identifying a specific destination, carefully charting a path to get there, evaluating your location throughout the voyage, and keeping an eye on what lies ahead.
Just like steering a ship, the role of a project controller is to steer a project to the right direction by carefully planning, monitoring, controlling, and forecasting the project’s cost and schedule.
The final destination in project controls is the project cost and schedule. This is the ultimate goal; that is to make sure that the project is going to finish on time and within budget. So, that’s the final destination. Just like steering a ship, you start with planning on how to get there. You develop a plan for your project, which is called “baseline”. You will measure your project performance against the baseline.
When you start your journey meaning when you are in the execution stage of your project, you start measuring and monitoring the status of your project. The aim is to minimize the deviation from your plan so that you make sure your project, or that ship, is back on track. You want to hit that end target; on time and within budget. And if not, you adjust your plan to make sure that you will get there.
And of course, another big role of project controls is “forecasting”. You have to always look ahead to foresee what is going to happen in your project so that you can take proactive or corrective actions required to bring your project back on track. That’s what project controls does.
So next time when someone asks you what you do as project controller, tell them that your role is like steering a ship to make sure it gets to the final destination on time and without extra cost.
