How Can Formal Project Controls Elevate Your Project Management Practice?

By Kirstin Larson, Project Controls Specialist

If you’re a program manager overseeing a portfolio of high-budget infrastructure projects, such as dams, water conveyance, and remediation projects, you’re familiar with the challenges of managing complex initiatives. Forecasting, budgeting, and keeping projects within a large program on scope and schedule while maintaining quality can feel like a balancing act.  These programs aren’t just about managing people — they are intricate webs of design, procurement, stakeholder and contractor coordination, permitting, and risk management.

For instance, as designs progress, the cost estimate for an infrastructure program can change, affecting funding. Contractor procurement takes time and can face delays, further exacerbating cost increases. Funding, environmental permitting and regulatory issues, land acquisition, and access agreements are other project risks. Material procurement, which often involves long lead times and high upfront costs for contractors, also requires careful planning to avoid disruptions. And that’s not all; external factors like national or local politics, stakeholder management, and unexpected events can introduce further uncertainty into project schedules. When managing multiple high-stakes projects in a program portfolio, your most significant challenge is to keep your finger on the pulse of every element and ensure accurate forecasting.

So, how do you manage this balancing act?

From my experience, many program managers still rely on manually constructed cashflows developed in error-prone Excel spreadsheets. While Excel is a valuable tool for many tasks, it’s less effective for the high-level project controls demanded by complex infrastructure programs. Updating these cashflows can be time-intensive and may not capture the nuances of how actual program progress impacts future planning. This can lead to gaps in your ability to make real-time decisions based on current project and/or program status.

The Power of Project Controls

This is where formalized project controls, such as a cost-loaded critical path schedule combined with a robust risk management program, can drastically improve how you manage your infrastructure programs. Professional project controls bring structure and discipline to an otherwise chaotic process. They provide a comprehensive framework to guide decision-making, risk mitigation, and overall program management.

Here’s how formal project controls can elevate your program management practice:

Accurate, Real-Time Insights

A well-managed, critical-path-driven, cost-loaded schedule allows you to have real-time insights into where your program’s portfolio of projects stand today and where they are projected to be in the future. This visibility enables you to monitor the physical progress of the projects within your program and how this progress correlates with your financial forecast. In essence, you can see if you’re on track, both in terms of schedule and budget, and take proactive steps to address potential issues before they escalate.

Manual cashflow tools rarely offer this level of integration between cost and schedule. Project controls let you link financials to actual project and program activities, ensuring that your forecasts are based on the most current, real-time data.

Scenario Modeling for Better Decision-Making

Formal project controls allow you to build different scenarios with relative ease. For example, if a critical shipment of materials is delayed or if permitting takes longer than expected, you can create multiple scenarios to model the impact of these delays on a specific project’s timeline and evaluate how it affects follow-on projects. This ability to conduct “what-if” analyses allows you to evaluate different courses of action and make informed decisions. Whether it’s adjusting your schedule, increasing resources, or identifying opportunities to accelerate certain tasks, project controls give you the data you need to confidently move forward.

Program managers who rely solely on Excel spreadsheets often find themselves reacting to changes rather than proactively managing them. But with scenario modeling capabilities that formal project controls offer, you can anticipate changes and make well-informed adjustments.

Enhanced Risk Management

Risk management is an essential component of managing complex infrastructure programs. Formal project controls integrate risk management within each project schedule and budget, providing a structured way to identify, assess, and mitigate potential risks. For example, you can create a risk register to tracks potential risks, assign probabilities and impacts, and develop strategies to mitigate them.

Incorporating a risk analysis into your cost-loaded schedule allows you to see how specific risks might affect the project timeline and budget. This, in turns, helps you prioritize implementing strategies to proactively mitigate these risks before they affect schedule and/or budget. Whether it’s a delay in materials, an unforeseen design change, or an external factor like a political event, having this foresight gives you the ability to prepare and respond accordingly.

Risk management should also be incorporated in project controls at the programmatic level. Programmatic risks such as not having sufficient financing and funding can delay the entire portfolio of projects and needs to have a strategy to effectively manage this. One strategy that we have seen used effectively is to include cost contingencies in the overall program budget.

Informed Decision-Making with Comprehensive Data

The data you collect through formal project controls—documenting both actual progress and baseline plans—becomes a powerful asset over time. Not only does it help you manage your current infrastructure program more effectively, it also provides valuable insights for future projects and programs. By analyzing trends, bottlenecks, and past performance, you can identify opportunities for improvement, streamline processes, and make better decisions based on historical data.

Additionally, this comprehensive data enables you to provide accurate and detailed reports to stakeholders, which ensures transparency and builds trust. In an industry where trust and communication are critical, this level of detailed reporting goes a long way in securing stakeholder confidence and ensuring project success.

The Competitive Edge of Project Controls

As a program manager, you know that a portfolio of projects within a large infrastructure program rarely proceed exactly as planned. Delays, budget overruns, and unexpected risks are inevitable. However, by implementing formal project controls, including cost-loaded critical path schedules and a robust risk management process, you gain the tools and insights needed to navigate these challenges with confidence.

Instead of relying on outdated methods, like manually updated spreadsheets, consider investing in a more formalized approach to project controls. This shift will not only provide you with a clearer picture of where your program stands but will also enhance your ability to manage risk, make informed decisions, and ultimately deliver the portfolio of projects within your program on time and within budget. As infrastructure projects become increasingly more complex, having these tools at your disposal will be key to maintaining a competitive edge and ensuring long-term success for both your infrastructure programs and your organization.

By leveraging the power of project controls, you can move from reactive management to proactive decision-making, all while delivering the high-budget, high-impact projects that your stakeholders expect. Are you interested in learning more? Contact me to start the discussion.