Question

Briefly describe a work-related or personal project that has been completed. What specific project control steps/methods were/could have been applied to enhance the probability of success? Consider the steps of The Project Control Cycle and various methods for monitoring performance.

Answer 1

Interior Design and Office Space Fitout works (Sample Project)

Project: Fit-out interiors for a shell and core office with 4 meeting rooms, CEO, CFO, CTO Rooms, Pantry, Lobby, Break out Area, Server Rooms, Branding of Common Areas, Total area to be worked 12500 Sqft

PLANNING PHASE

Project Team: Consisted of the following teams. Admin Team, Finance Team, Operations Team.

Project Softwares used: Slack communications, Trello Board and Monday.com

STEPS INVOLVED IN PLANNING PHASE

1. Finalising the fit-out interior after management discussions and getting the layout plan
2. Selection of a contractor to perform jobs based on his project portfolio. the objective is to have at least 3 contractors proposals
3. Finalising layout plan and the contractor for the job
4. discussing the payment terms and the project duration with the selected fit-out contractor
5. Final plan to be availed from the contractor and submitted to municipalities/sanctioning departments for approvals
6. Arrangement of storage facility for storing procured material
7. Debris management to be done for removing any debris before project commencement
8. Contract finalisation with fit-out contractor, the release of advance payment for starting job
9. Finalising project schedule based on the approvals from authorities
10. Dividing the project to stages, creating benchmarks for each stage completion. Trello Boards to have several phases of projects and Monday.com to have details of each phase and identifying tasks involved
11. Completion of each stage, releasing of payments associated with each stage
12. Signing off the project from the authorities, Project handover documentation preparation and releasing the final payment minus the retention amount.

EXECUTION PHASE

1. Project layout plan finalised as line drawing from top management summarising actual requirement. Creating a slack team with all the project members. Slack will have channels like #general, #pending, #payments, #workinprogress, #punchlist, #trelloboard etc. The idea of having slack is for a virutal project managment tool. Here all the involved people can interact each other and post the progress of their assigned activity in the respective channels. The project manager in turn can efficiently supervise the overall status of the porject and compare the proejct progress with the proejct schedule. Once the slack communication protocol is fixed, then time can be more efficiently utilised and project meeting frequencies can be increased.
2. Parallel Activities
   1. Preparation of necessary documents needed for submission to authorities to accept the fit-out contractor chosen
   2. Cleaning up the shell and core office space for any debris for project start
   3. Preparing a storage space to store materials brought in by the Fitout contractor.
   4. Project Manager finalising fit-out contractor Activities 2-4 above
3. Softwares involved in execution.
   1. Slack provides an excellent platform for all the team members mentioned above to interact each other. The project manager can delegate tasks to each member of the team for the activity. There are options for the team to accept the task, work on it, post updates and post the completion.
   2. The project manager can create the individual activities on a Trello board and move them to task in progress and finally to completion for his documentation.
   3. The project itself can be broken down and charted in monday.com in detail with deadlines.

All these software mentioned above has an email triggering facility that can be configured so that each activity is individually reported. For any project to end fast, and efficiently, reporting is an important factor.

CONTROL PHASE

In the control phase, the project manager makes sure that the defined processes are completed according to the break up of the work schedule. It is during this phase the project manager identifies deviations from the initial project planning. For example, during the approval submission phase, the contractor may have skipped (just for example purpose only) the emergency exit and stairways associated with it. This becomes a deviation since the entire drawing needs to redrawn, the project schedule gets affected. Progress entered in the software above should be amended along with the costs associated with it.

The advantages of using the software mentioned above is that, multiple levels of monitoring is possible. For example, the top management can monitor what task the project manager does by having the email trigger or having the supervisory passwords for the platforms mentioned above. Even though the project manager reports the actual progress of the project, based on his inputs, the top management can easily due an audit since they too (if configured) will receive the project updatees.

Corrective actions can easily be suggested to those items if overseen by the project manager itself by the top managment

COMPLETION PHASE.

If managed correctly, and reporting makes a new task assignment easier for any incomplete or non-progressive tasks. The project could be completed with deviations from originals if any by using the software platforms above. The ultimate objective of the top management as well as the project manager should be the ability to monitor the task completion and reporting in the software used. Constant audit of different tasks needs to be done in the software platforms. The successful completion of the project depends largely upon the ability of the management as well as the project manager to manage the software used properly. If any tasks remain unassigned or not completed could affect the completion of the project.