- As you move for a project's life cycle, you'll need a way to track and report on all of the moving parts to make sure they're effective and not blocked. This is where progress monitoring comes in. In this video, we'll discuss some of the things progress monitoring normally includes: the six components of project delivery that need to be controlled, the three components of a project that may need to be controlled, and agile, iterative, and timeboxing approaches to project control. We'll also briefly touch on the earned value management technique you can use for measuring and reporting in a project lifecycle, but you'll need to go through these materials we've provided to make sure you understand this fully as it's too complicated for a short video format like this. Okay, to start off then, progress monitoring needs to start with some agreements for the way you'll be monitoring certain aspects of the project. This might include finishing the project to the right quality standards, keeping team members happy and motivated, and how well you expect contractors to perform. With any of these project elements, there are six key components that you'll need to monitor, and they are scope, schedule, finance, risk, quality, and resource. So what kind of controls do you have at your disposal to deal with these different aspects of projects? Well, there are three main types of project control. The first is cybernetic. This kind of control depends on using a consistent loop of feedback to oversee the project, and regularly checking project progress and taking any necessary corrective action. The second kind of project control is a go/no-go. This is normally the type of control used by project sponsors at the decision gates and is based on the assessment of project viability as documented in the project's business case. The last type of control is called post-control. You will use this after the project is complete by reviewing the project to learn lessons for future projects. So now that we've covered the aspects of a project that controls will monitor, the components that need monitoring, and three different kinds of project control you can use, let's quickly talk about project controls in an agile or iterative lifecycle. This kind of framework is actually really great for monitoring because they focus on delivering the minimal usable functionality within a set budget. So where work is delivered in a series of iterations, or timeboxes, it allows for more frequent analysis of progress and incremental delivery. These approaches tend to enable the use of burn up or burn down charts to track work completion, measure progress, and calculate the velocity of the team. Early on in this video, I mentioned the six key components you'll want to monitor for any parts of a project, the scope, schedule, finance, risk, quality, and resource. The earned value management, or EVM technique, focuses on what is potentially the most important of these: scope, schedule, and budget. The way it works is that it measures the amount of useful work delivered at a given point in time during the project life cycle, for the amount actually spent delivering this work compared to the amount of the budget planned to have been spent at the time in the project. I emphasized given point there, because there are a few things you're trying to understand at that point. They are, the progress that's been achieved so far, the cumulative cost of the project so far, and the budget that's still planned for the project going forward. By understanding these fundamental questions, you can determine how the project is performing at that point in time. What makes this process difficult to implement is that it needs quite a few things to be in place and working. Things like a well defined scope, baseline schedule, cost data, accurately captured data about the project, and effective change control. It also tends to work best in a linear life cycle. There's quite a bit more you need to know about EVM, so make sure you review the resources and work through the practice activities to make sure you can use this technique properly. And that's it for this video. Progress monitoring and reporting is an important function for both project managers and sponsors. In this video, we've covered the basics of progress monitoring, including where it applies, the key components of it, the different kinds of progress monitoring, and an overview of the EVM technique that you can use in your own projects.