Monitoring, Control and Project Organization

Abstract

All the methods described up to now have been for planning and scheduling, and are necessarily employed before the project begins. The result is a forecast of how the project will run, and the probability of perfect achievement is zero. Disturbances of one sort or another are bound to occur and will call for the intervention of the project manager. Presenting him with appropriate data is called monitoring the network (or updating or statusing) and the action which he consequently takes is control. A control system provides the means of achieving a plan and, if necessary, adjusting it to correct for unexpected disturbances. Most modern mechanisms for automatic control are error-regulated or feedback circuits, a concept which now extends to management as well as machinery. A feedback control circuit, compares the performance achieved (A) with a target (T), measures their difference (D = A − T) and feeds back the difference, either directly or as a derived function, to the effector (E) which is responsible for the performance. A new value for A is thereby generated and the control process repeats itself sequentially. The continuous sequence ADE forms a loop, and since positive values of the difference D cause E to reduce the value of A, ADE is called a negative feedback control loop.