MONITORING AND CONTROL STAGE (SCHEDULE) : CONTROL SCHEDULE

Control schedule is the process of monitoring the status of the project activities according to the schedule baseline, determining if the project schedule has changed and managing changes as they occur. Note that control schedule process helps to determine the rate of producing the validated and accepted deliverables in a given time.

This process can use the following inputs:

• Project management plan that describes how to monitor and control the project schedule in the schedule management plan, how to compare the actual work delivered and accepted with the estimates of work completed according to schedule baseline and if there is a change, how to manage that change.
• Project Schedule that provides types and quantity of activity resources, and amount of durations as well as costs for the project activities.
• Project Calendar that provides the working days and shifts for the activities.
• Work performance data that provides the progress of the project like which activities have started, which activities have partially done (percent complete) and which activities have finished.
• Schedule data that provides information for describing and controlling schedule like schedule milestones, activities, activity attributes, identified assumptions and constraints.
• Organizational Process Assets such as monitoring and reporting methods and tools to use for control schedule, the existing schedule control related procedures, guidelines and policies etc

Control schedule process can be done by:

• Doing performance reviews in order to measure, compare and analyze the schedule performance like the actual start and finish dates, percent complete and remaining duration for the work in progress
• Using project management software that has the ability to track the planned dates against the actual dates, report the variances and predict the effects of changes to the project schedule.
• Applying resource optimization technique whereby the activities and resources required for those activities are scheduled as long as they are available.
• Increasing lead time and decreasing lag time in order to bring the activities that are behind into alignment with the plan
• Compressing the schedule either fast-tracking or crashing for the remaining work in order to bring the activities that are behind into alignment with the plan
• Using the scheduling tool that generates the start and end dates based on the inputs of the activities, resources, durations, leads and lags etc. This helps to analyse and produce an updated project schedule.

 The outputs are:

• Work performance information that provides the updates or progress on the project including which activity has started, which in on progress and which has completed. This information will be documented and communicated to the stakeholders
• Schedule forecasts as predictions based on the work performance information provided when the project is executed.
• Change requests to the schedule baseline will be produced if there are recommendations to reduce the schedule variance.
• Updates in 
• Project management plan if the approved change requests have an effect on the project cost and schedule, 
• Project documents such as project schedule, schedule data and risk register because of compressing schedule and 
• Organizational process assets like causes of variances, preventive and corrective actions taken with their reasons and lessons learnt from this process.

References:

PMI (2013). A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide 5^th Ed.) USA, Project Management Institute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JwdW11tn6E