Have you ever witnessed a project that is about to go live when all of a sudden it stalls and the implementation fails? The failed project was kicked off with fanfare and had encountered no major problems (at least that you were aware of) until now! This article provides advice on using project controls to steer you away from project failure and towards success. Firstly I will establish the importance of using effective project controls and explain how they work.

The failed project scenario introduced above points to a lack of adequate project control. Gregory Balestrero, President and CEO of the Project Management Institute identified in a recent keynote presentation that “50% of project failure is traced to poor (or no) project management”. Between starting and finishing a project controlling delivery is vital to a successful implementation.

Anyone can call themselves an "Accountant" but you're only allowed to call yourself a "Chartered Accountant" if you are:

• an NZICA member who has trained for 7 years to attain your qualification
• subject to the professional bodies code of ethics
• continuing your education programme; and
• subject to disciplinary procedures

In short if you employ a Chartered Accountant you are at least ensuring that some important boxes have been ticked.  Can the same be said for Project Managers?  The short answer is no.

We had our doubts that the conference theme – ‘Restoring the trust’ - would offer a broad enough palette to make the content of the conference interesting. However we were pleasantly surprised – the speakers were informative with plenty of ideas that we could take away and apply to our Project Management and consulting practice.

Developing and retaining our consultants is a key to our ongoing business success and ensures that we can continue to deliver you with the best in Project Management consultancy. When we are working with you it is important that we are treated as a trusted advisor – so the conference theme was a great reminder of the importance of this to our business.

A PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey has reported:

• 80% of higher performing projects use a certified Project Manager;
• and 50% of project failure is traced to poor (or no) project management.

It is difficult to empirically express the value project management delivers because to compare one project to another is to compare an apple with a pear, or a dingy with a yacht – they are simply not the same.

MWH - a multinational company specialising in infrastructure projects, performed an analysis of all project budget variances for the years 2000-2004.

It was identified that for large projects (in excess of $100k) those that ran at a gain (against budgeted revenue) only made small gains (none larger that +1.5%) while those projects that ran at a loss often ran to significant losses -2% to -10%.