Effective Tracking, Not Just Tracking…

If you don't track your project, you can't control it. And, if a project isn't being controlled,
it's out of control… Effective project tracking is hard.

– James Davison, Tim Mackinnon and Michael Royle
The Slacker's Guide to Project Tracking

As a project manager, if you are not effectively monitoring or better say, tracking, your project, there is every chance that the project may be way off the mark in terms of meeting its schedule or budget or deliverables or a combination of all of them. Tracking helps the project manager in identifying any discrepancy, which may have crept in during the course of progress of the project, early on and on time. Failure to detect such discrepancies can prove to be disastrous. “Project scheduling and tracking are key parameters to a project’s success or failure,” suggests the cover story. The author avers that construction of a (resource-feasible) project schedule is a prerequisite for a reliable and accurate project tracking approach during project execution.

However, there is a dearth of good tools that can assist in effective project tracking. The author says that although earned value systems have been proven to provide reliable estimates for the follow-up of cost performance within certain project assumptions, they often fail to predict the total duration of the project. The cover story presents summary results obtained from a large simulation study on a wide and diverse set of projects which is summarized in his book, Measuring Time. The study investigates the potential of three earned value-based methods to forecast the final project duration.

The findings by the author highlight that under normal circumstances (defined as project progress where the schedule performance indicators report reliable results during the life of the project), the earned schedule method has the best performance, leading to small deviations between the duration forecast and the final project duration. This, the author says, suggests that the earned schedule method can be considered as a reliable time-forecasting method, as the method’s forecast is strongly based on the quality of the SPI(t) value, and is able to forecast the final project duration in an accurate way when the schedule performance indicator SPI(t) reports a correct warning signal about the current project performance.

The author further suggests that the planned value and earned duration methods are more reliable in cases when the Earned Value Method (EVM)-based performance measures provide less reliable results (e.g., a delay in a non-critical activity often leads to an indication of an overall project delay, although the project may be still on track). The author’s findings also highlight the fact that the closeness of a project network to a complete parallel of serial network is an important driver of forecast accuracy. Time predictions, he adds, are relatively more accurate for projects with a lot of serial activities compared to more parallel project networks.

- Amit Singh Sisodiya