How to Control Project Progress and Cost ?

Tracking and managing project progress and cost are crucial to project success. If you don’t do it, you won’t know where you’re at or when you’re going to arrive at your destination. 

Wrong approach will end up losing control

Some project managers measure progress simply by asking the project team member “How’s it going?” And the reply is things like “OK” or “40% Complete”. But do both the project manager and the project team member really have the same meaning of “OK” or “40% Complete”? The team member’s reply is subjective and not likely to tell whether the deliverable will be completed on time. In other words, it’s a pretty meaningless bit of information.

Some project managers who are technically competent can review work-in-progress deliverables. But that type of project managers can only manage small projects.  When they are managing large projects, they will be being spread too thin and won’t be able to accurately find out whether the work-in-progress deliverables are truly on track or not.

Right approach will ensure the appropriate level of control

The key is for the project managers to use the 4-eyes principle and to leverage the available resources as the checkers for the deliverables. It matters less whether the maker-checker control is accomplished with explicit assignments (e.g., the checkers are the persons who will need to use the deliverables when they are done) or implicit reviews in Sprint meetings.

Cost control

Projects that are meeting their milestones doesn’t guarantee that they won’t be cost overrun. Making sure that you have a modern project management software such as 8Manage PM that can capture time and deliverable progress as well as cost in an integrated and real-time manner is very important.

Some projects used their organizations’ financial accounting software to control their project costs and resulted in not knowing their project cost overrun until a few months later. It is important to point out that financial accounting is using the double entry method and will require manual efforts to determine what chart-of-accounts involve and how to credit/debit them. The modern project management software that use single entry method can calculate the project financials (based on documents attesting to the giving or receiving of money, goods, etc., such as receipts, bills, vouchers and invoices) in real-time.