Week 7 BADM 635- Executing the Project Reflection- Initial Post Raeesa Potnis University of the Cumberlands 8/9/2021 The topics of project evaluation and control discussed this week are central to ensuring the success of a project. A project manager needs to ensure that the activities in the project are being carried out in accordance with the approved plan, policy, schedule, budget, quality standard, procedure, and safety standards. Monitoring a project at regular intervals helps project managers follow the project’s progress against the baseline. Evaluation is a systematic and objective assessment of an on-going or completed activity, project program, strategy, policy, and its design, implementation, and result. As an essential part of the policy development process, evaluation provides a timely assessment of the relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability of interventions. Project control uses the monitored data and information to bring actual performance into an agreement with the plan. It Involves comparing actual performance with planned performance and taking appropriate corrective action that will yield the desired outcome in the project when a significant difference exists. The chapter on project closeout and termination focused on the processes associated with closing out projects in a proper manner such that all stakeholder expectations are met. This is the final step in the project’s lifecycle (Pinto, 2019). Response 1: Earned value management (EVM) is a project management methodology that integrates schedule, costs, and scope to measure project performance. Based on planned and actual values, EVM predicts the future and enables project managers to adjust accordingly. This method links costs incurred to the time and budget baseline as well as to measurable performance milestones. By using EVM, the government is requiring that costs incurred during the project be directly tied to performance or progress of the project. The cost of the project s based on the budgeted cost of work performed. Therefore, negative or positive variances in performance are measured by the value of the work performed, not by the costs spent to complete the work. This allows companies to have a better understanding of what variances mean and their impact on the overall project. By understanding the meaning of variances, managers are in a better position to take corrective action and to keep the project on schedule. Response 2: Lessons learned programs can fail when they are only perceived as a formality to closeout the project. When this is treated only as another documentation step instead of ensuring that the analysis regarding the lesson learned is genuine and appropriate, these programs can often fail. The purpose of lessons learned meetings and documentation is to make note of what worked for the project and what didn’t such that future projects and managers can benefit from this knowledge. If assumptions regarding project hurdles are made that lead to insufficient documentation of the problem and resulting solution, then this can be misinterpreted by future project teams or disregarded all together. References Pinto, J. K. (2019). PROJECT MANAGEMENT: ACHIEVING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, 5th Edition. New York, NY: Pearson.
