Chapter 73: Big Picture of Monitoring and Controlling the Project

You monitor and control your project by monitoring and controlling the project performance, changes, and risks. Monitoring includes measuring project performance, collecting information about project performance, and evaluating performance information to see the trends. Continuous monitoring helps the project management team identify the areas that need to be controlled closely by, for example, taking corrective or preventive actions.

Trivia:
Monitoring and controlling does not start only after the project starts execution. Rather, the project needs to be monitored and controlled all the way from initiation through closing. Just for the sake of following the PMI Specification on process grouping, the Monitoring & Controlling Process Group is separate but monitoring happens throughout the life of the project.

A project is monitored and controlled using the Monitor and Control Project Work and Perform Integrated Change Control processes, which are high-level processes performed by executing more specific processes, such as cost control, schedule control, and scope control. All these processes are in the monitoring and controlling process group except the Directing & Managing Project Execution process, which belongs to the executing group

The picture below explains the process group

As illustrated in the picture above, work performance information generated by the Direct and Manage Project Execution process is used by most of the monitoring and controlling processes. The Control Scope, Control Schedule, and Control Cost processes analyze this information to generate work performance measurements, which are used by some other processes, such as Perform Quality Control and Report Performance. The Report Performance process generates performance reports, which are used by the Monitor and Control Risks and Administer Procurements processes. One obvious output of most of these processes is the change requests, including recommended corrective and preventive actions, which go through the Perform Integrated Change Control process for approval. If approved, the execution of these actions and changes is managed using Direct and Manage Project Execution, a process in the executing process group.

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