Project management

Introduction
Project management monitoring tools involve reviewing, tracking, and reporting the project’s progress to meet the defined performance objectives in a project management plan. The primary benefit of the process is that it helps the stakeholders understand the project’s present state better. Furthermore, the various steps taken in the input, tools used to monitor the project, and the perceived outcomes like scheduling, forecasts, and budgeting are all left for evaluation once the project is in progress or complete with all the deliverables intact. When setting up project controls and monitoring tools, the first thing is to establish the project baselines whereby the budget, scope, and stakeholders are determined. These variables are used to determine the direction of the project and the eventual completion and progress tracking.

What are the tools and the technique’s purpose?
As a continuous process, project-monitoring tools will reflect the most common elements of project monitoring and control. This is because as the APM Olympic Project progresses, new risks will emerge, risks may change, and the residual risks may decrease or even increase. Therefore, for the project to achieve the intended results, risk reassessment, audit, trend analysis, performance measures, analysis of reserve, and keeping meetings is required. Whereas, reassessment of risk will entail new risk identification, evaluation of current-risks, and assessments about the whole risk-management-process, the audit of risk, on the other hand, will seek to examine the effectiveness of the risk-responses (Frame, 2014).

To ensure mitigation of risky situations do not get out of hand, watching the trends and variances between cost and schedule will aid in refining better responses. Meetings to deliberate on the progress of the project will play a pivotal role. Most meetings track and monitor the risks as key challenges, concerns, and learnings are tabled and discussed.

Aproject manager, needs to analyse the project scope to decide if he should use internal resources to accommodate the project scope. If not, the work needs to be outsourced to another organisation. This is where contracts come into play, a project management contract refers to documented mutual agreements between clients/buyers and contractors. Clients choose the most attractive contract for their project and proceed to negotiate terms. Turnkey and cost-plus project contracts are two of the most efficient agreements in the current project management environment (Gleadle, Hodgson, and Storey, 2012).

A cost-plus project, which is also referred to as a cost-reimbursement project, is defined as a contract to repay a contractor’s project costs in addition to the contract profit amount. The client or the purchaser settles all indirect and direct expenses and the contractor’s profits and expenses. The contractor provides all the necessary documentation for the client to settle the expenses. However, the client may not be required to pay the contractor’s expenses in some cases, primarily when the costs are incurred because of the contractor’s negligence. Thus, clients should consider these characteristics before choosing the contract.

The tools
Several inputs in a project management plan ensure that progress reports, schedule forecasts, and performance information are kept up to date with the project management process’s current working environment. Some of the tools necessary for the project monitoring include expert judgment, analytical techniques, project management information systems, and meetings that occur face-to-face or virtual.

In the expert judgment, in most cases, the stakeholders or customers give their informed opinions on the effectiveness and acceptability of the project. For instance, in the APM Olympic games, the experts in this instance were the participating athletes and the audience. The venue was said to be flooding, which was due to poor drainage. This is a failure of the project manager to mitigate the risks involved making it seem past. Expert engineers examining the project call for the process to have contractors and other stakeholders giving their alternative opinions on a different way to solve the issue. In structural engineering, the drainage system should be effective when digging on the foundation, but if it lacks the proper incentives to design an effective one, there will be a disaster and danger to athletes competing in the field. The carelessness also shows the lack of commitment to the project, with the project managers lacking foresight portending disaster on the field (Gleadle, Hodgson and Storey, 2012).

In the project management information system, the previous record of setting up the effective cost management strategies and understanding the real reasons for project overrun are instrumental in evading such risks in project management. It implicates that APM Olympic should look into adopting such strategies to avoid project overrun risks. Coming up with a cost management system helps to significantly address the aspects of cash flows, budget versus actual financial resources, subcontractor’s agreements, and online approval of purchase invoices. This system fundamentally needs the project manager to operate the data in real-time and manage the critical indicators of project overrun, such as cost forecast, profits, and completion percentages (Minelle, 2019).

The cost management strategies, therefore, will help to eliminate project-overrun doubts at the Olympic. To further offer solutions to the project overrun risks in the sports arena, it is vital to understand the basis of this particular problem in the project management team’s perception. Acknowledging the long-term economic effect that project overrun imposes on project development helps to enhance cautiousness when drafting budgets for projects. In this case, it is likely to triumph over the project-overrun risks when the focus is on maintaining productive relationships in the project team.

The team should deploy proper organizational innovation. Failure of doing this may lead to lengthy projects. However, these challenges can be mitigated by; drafting a proper plan that will enable the team to know the project details and stipulated time for the project completion. The project progress should also be monitored regularly and a detailed work plan created. This will enable the project to meet its deadline. For a successful project, the IT teams should be able to make a positive contribution to the project. The project manager should also ensure that the stakeholders understand the project requirements. He should also decide on a proper methodology to use in the project. The project sponsors should ensure the availability of the resources, make the key decisions, and approve the project budget. A business analyst should document the technical and business requirements and ensure that they are met (Wysocki and Gillingham, 2014).

To identify and plan responses to newly identified risks.
In the project’s risk management toolbox, several tools for risk identification will help spot new risks that will be immediately given the necessary focus and response before causing a great negative impact on the project. Whereas a few meetings with experts and brainstorming the risks sounds a good start, such an expert judgment is not enough. Identifying new risks will entail more periodic risk-reviews and data gathering and development as well as a collection of new checklists. Thus, comparisons with competitors in the industry and a workshop with the relevant stakeholders will guarantee the effective identification of new risks. Additionally, sound risk-intelligence will be employed backed up by SWOT analysis to inform on the strengths, weaknesses, and threats (Wysocki and Gillingham, 2014). Actions and options to handle and respond to new risks, response-plan, will be unleashed and implemented through the insertion of activities and resources into the project’s budget and schedule to remove, transfer or mitigate the additional risks.

Several changes may also be encountered when working with a visual team in project management. The virtual team is geographically dispersed. Due to the dispersion, the team interacts through electronic communication. Due to this physical distance, there is no physical interaction between the team. It thereby difficulty in duty delegation. This even makes computation more difficult since all the works have to be shared among the teams. Attention thus has to be created on every member to facilitate the competence and commitment of these members. There is also a challenge due to time zone differences. Since the members of the team reside in a different location, holding meetings and corporation between the team is becoming somehow challenging.  The virtual team always constitute of people from a different ethnic background.

Conclusion
Project monitoring is an important part of the project since, during the execution, various risks and changes are necessary. In the process, the project managers always have the task of ensuring the project deliverables are adequately covered when the project is underway. Moreover, overcoming the differences between the teams becomes difficult since everyone follows his working method. The team may also face misunderstanding due to poor communication, lack of proper direction, and clarity of the information.