How Well Do You Know the Project and Program Control Techniques?

Multinational business entities refer to Project and Program Control Techniques (PPCT), for ensuring the success of their endeavors from various facets of Corporate Management. The non-repetitive project or program is becoming an increasingly frequent phenomenon for the last three decades in large organizations. As these projects also increase in scale, complexity, and cost, new methods for planning and controlling them have been and are being developed. The best known of the older approaches is the Gantt chart, which was developed by Henry L. Gantt.

This relatively simple chart has made a significant contribution to project management and is still a valuable and widely used control tool. It is also the foundation upon which the other, more sophisticated types of project and program control techniques: milestone scheduling, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), and Critical Path Method (CPM) – are based.

Milestone Scheduling: If you select a date when a certain accomplishment, decision, or event is to take place and indicate that date on the horizontal bar of a chart, you have created a milestone. The milestone date may be a date on which a decision is to be made concerning outside financing; it may be a date when announcement of the project to the trade press is planned; it may simply be a date when a thorough project progress review is scheduled. Usually, however, the milestone represents a selected date by which a certain phase of the entire project is to be implemented.

Network Analysis: PERT and CPM: Gantt charts are appropriate for scheduling a series of unrelated activities, such as separate production runs in a job shop operation. The milestone method can be used to divide major project into sub-activities so that managers can achieve greater control. Neither approach, however, can adequately deal with the interrelationships among activities or events. These interrelationships form an important aspect of more complex projects and programs in which one activity or event will often depend on the successful completion of other activities or events.

In such situations, some form of network analysis is necessary to ensure that the entire project or program is moving ahead as planned. The two major forms of network technique are Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM). The systems were developed independently, although virtually at the same time, around 1957 – 58. PERT was first developed for the U.S. Navy in connection with the Polaris weapons system and is credited with reducing the completion time of the program by two years. CPM was developed by Du Pont in order to facilitate its control of large, complex industrial projects. The two systems are similar in most essential respects.

The main difference lies in the treatment of time estimates. PERT was created primarily to handle research and development projects in which time spans are based on probabilistic estimates. CPM, on the other hand, is usually concerned with projects that the organization has had some previous experience with. Time estimates, therefore, can be made relatively accurately. The use of both PERT and CPM has spread rapidly and made a significant impact on the planning and control of projects and programs.

Both systems are most appropriate for controlling special, complex, non-repetitive projects such as development of a large weapons system, highway construction, shipbuilding, or the installation of a large-scale data processing system. However, PERT or CPM system involve considerable expense, particularly if the system is computerized. In deciding whether or not to use a system, managers must determine to what extent the project to be controlled is time-critical.

For example, projects such as reinforcing a weak dam, constructing a building, or completing contracts that include penalty payment clauses are highly time-critical. The expense of a complete CPM or PERT system would probably be justified for such projects, since these systems make it much more likely that the projects will be completed on time. In your job, are you applying these techniques? Which one and why?