Project Management

Maintaining Control During Project Execution 165

Cost:

• Estimated expenditure (or labor hours) for all activities


• Actual expenditure (or labor hours logged) for each
  completed activity


• Amount spent to date (or labor hours logged) on each
  activity currently under way


• Estimated cost to complete (or additional labor hours
  required) for each activity currently under way

Functionality:

• Estimated (originally envisioned) capabilities of final
  deliverables


• Current prediction of what capabilities will actually be

Quality:

• Original estimation of how well final deliverables will
  function


• Current prediction of how well they actually will function

How Do You Gather Information?

Obviously, you have to gather a lot of information and keep
track of many things throughout the life of the project. How do
you go about getting this kind of information? What processes
and methods can you use? Among the most common ones are
the following:

Team Meetings. As you can see from the list above, project
analysis consists of elements of the past, the present, and the
future. The main conduit of current information is ordinarily
your project team status meetings. As mentioned earlier, project
team meetings should be conducted regularly throughout the
life of the project. Figure 9-1 illustrates how choosing a reason-
able team meeting frequency yields three groups of activity
updates.
Past information consists of recording actual results of com-
pleted activities. This is the first order of business. The second
order of business—and the main focus of most team meetings—

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