Do you have a project control department, or do you control your projects?

The two may not be the same! It's an all too familiar picture: disparate teams working to their own agendas; reluctant, sporadic collaboration; inaccessible and out of date information all make for poor project control.

Simplify your process, improve your capture and use of data, get your people on board the change... and you can transform your operation - cutting costs and boosting profits, project by project.

WCI’s Emma Marlow examines the problems and explains how they can be solved. Must do better? Year on year performance figures for the construction industry make dispiriting reading.

DTI for the sector show Key Performance Indicators for predictability and cost have remained static for the last five years.

Half of projects still overrun on time or cost, or both. In the same period customer satisfaction measures have barely improved. Only the very largest firms have seen much gain from their introduction of a degree of integrated project control - and the improvement has been less than spectacular.

Too many projects across the whole construction sector are simply delivered over budget, late or with profit devouring defects. This is in spite of the pressure being brought to bear through tighter, performance-related contracts. Make no mistake, today’s sophisticated penalty clauses bite. Constructors have to fix defects not just up to handover, but during the life of the project - and at their own expense. Unless your project control system produces the work on time, on budget and to specification, you could be losing money for years to come.

Such arrangements are now the norm on contracts of £10 million and more. In a climate that rewards only excellent performance, the costs of providing anything less could be terminal.

Customers and financial markets are losing patience with unpredictable projects. The tools are readily available and proven techniques exist for designing change and making it work - not just now but into the future. Victory will go to those who can deliver not just high profile projects on time and to budget, but deliver every project consistently. Accurate, consistent and timely.

The beauty of construction is, it’s blindingly obvious when you’ve got it wrong. Whether it simply falls down, or nobody can get into the car park, you cannot, in the end, hide serious mistakes. Clients only pay after mistakes have been put right - burying one’s head in the cement and hoping the problem will go away is not an option.

Project data must be right, accurate and last for decades, otherwise profits will not flow when they should, safe from unexpected problems and costs. Suppliers, too, need to know about progress and changes. It's a balancing act between transparency and security – the data people need and the information they'd be interested to see do not entirely overlap! But suppliers have to know enough to plan their own production and delivery, benefiting all parties. A second essential characteristic of any viable project control system is that it has one single way of measuring: across projects, locations and departments. This approach produces figures that are robust and clear to see.

But accuracy and consistency are not enough: data must also be timely. Imagine steering your car by watching a video that’s just seconds out of date.

You turn the wheel, nothing seems to happen. So you turn it some more, exaggerating errors instead of mitigating them. You need to know what’s happening now and react instantly, the wheel barely twitching in your hands. It’s the same with project control. There’s no use finding out mistakes two months after the event. You need information which is so current and so fine grained that you pick up deviation before it does any damage and can put it right seamlessly.

A close to real time view and an alert response system that's instant if necessary. So this is the aim - to unlock the potential you have for accurate, consistent and responsive measurement and management, leading to higher profits, flowing when they should, with no surprises down the line. Nothing less than the transformation of your project control system. To bring that about, we use a model of change that’s proven across industrial and commercial sectors.

Here are the main steps: Maps your processes against current best practice and what your organisation needs. Project teams often have customised their way of working, but these are rarely distributed to other teams. Benchmarking highlights improvements already proven in your organisation, which can deliver benefits to all projects and corporate performance.

Dialogue and Diagnosis Identifies changes critical to success and quantifies the benefits. Quick wins Identifies and implements a few high visibility ‘ground breakers’. Success generates internal ‘ambassadors for change’. Gains cover initial investment costs. Implement: simplify, standardise and automate Now, we work with you to develop, detail and action the overall plan. Together we design the best project control processes for your strategic goals, re-design procedures, template and document them, and automate and test the solution.

Standardisation reduces errors and start up time, increases productive time and speeds up delivery. Roll out and embed the changes. We work with you to develop the training, communication and incentives to ensure adoption. Our collaborative approach communicates and embeds the new way of working, building confidence and commitment so that people take it on and run with it. Timescale Diagnosis and outline planning can take as little as ten days. Implementation takes a few months - bringing visible, substantial and self sustaining gains from ‘go’.

Project control environment
Take standardisation too far and you get a monolithic system that produces crude, out of date results. Presentations and metrics must get information back quickly, accurately and consistently; but they must also serve different interests at the same time. So, results are presented in the most useful way for the recipient - but all are referenced to the same bedrock data.Each user receives as much detail as they need to do their job and fix any problems that are flagged up. It’s an integrated ‘best of breed’ solution.

Management Dashboard
A management dashboard provides accurate, up to date reports on KPIs across projects. Managers can drill down to items needing more attention. A Project Director may want a view across all projects, which flags up potential resource clashes, so they can be avoided. A Project Manager can work with greater detail on a single project knowing the bigger picture is also being taken care of. Alignment The dashboard shows current status - Red, Amber or Green - on any measure or criterion; and because the measures are aligned to business objectives, there is coherence and consistency throughout the enterprise. The project control system ensures that everybody has the right information at the right time to perform their roles accurately. A customised web based project portal puts access to everything from calendars to processes in one place. Documentation, training and the IT environment ensure that all contributors are aligned with project goals, support collaboration and information sharing, and understand their role in the overall project delivery.

Best behaviour
New technology and process are a key part of making improvements, but are not the whole solution.What’s missing is attention to the human element. People resist change. In construction everybody tries to give themselves a little elbow room, just in case things don’t quite pan out. This guarantees problems. The trick is to understand the environment and what drives behaviours. Project Managers are competitive, independently minded, focused on results and what they are measured against. This can make it difficult to impose standards and share best practice. Creative minds can spend too much time making results look good rather than be good. However, putting in place the right measures and aligning incentives can bring about a competitive drive that’s focused on producing results for projects and Project Managers. The initiative needs leadership from the top, with words backed up by actions - the ‘poke and stroke’ principle. Change is implemented at the project level and the demonstration of success in a project has far more impact than an edict from the Project Controls Department. The watchword for all of this activity is ‘involvement’. Only staff themselves can take the outline plan and make it a reality that sticks - for they have to drive it forward. Do it without them and detail will be wrong - good ideas and best practice will be lost. Worse, the new system will begin to decay the moment the external team leaves. Excluded staff will rapidly circumvent it as they bend their talents and imaginations to restoring the status quo, instead of to the efficient operation and continual refinement of the new system. What you get out of it The general alignment with project goals, stages and processes that a good project control system promotes, also improves cross functional communication. Project teams are integrated, no longer ploughing along in parallel furrows, never talking, never converging - travelling silos! Common standards, categories and terminology foster better relations between groups and even companies. Improved project control puts real time knowledge in one place and makes it accessible to whoever needs it, in the form they need it, when they need it.With a clear overall picture, efficiency and decisions improve as team communication opens up. Reporting costs fall and what’s reported is more accurate. Problems are resolved earlier and quicker, control is tighter and easier, supplier collaboration increases and margins improve: mitigation not litigation. Investment in this holistic approach delivers a return within six months, even before full implementation. Project Control costs typically fall by 15%

Summary Overall, the organisation with effective project control can expect profit into the future, with fewer surprises, improved precision and timeliness of data that match the requirements of today’s contracts - coupled with analysis and control systems that enable you to react in the right and timely way to get the rewards those contracts so tantalisingly offer. DTI Construction Statistics Annual 2005