The Control Function at the Tactical Level

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Also, it must be made clear that information transmitted upward to management about problems and troubles is desired so that higher management can help to identify and solve problems. Such action in an organization results from an organizational penalty and reward structure that encourages this openness and allays any fears that exist in most organizations about this matter. Management must demonstrate that they do not want just "sales presentations" that emphasize how successfully the technical people are functioning, because negative results are also important to further the technical control needed.

As a control technique, the budget for a particular project, coupled with milestone charts, offers manage1nent one of the most basic and simple controls. Milestone charts have an inherent disadvantage; even if the engineer objectively reports the accomplishment or lack of accomplishment of a particular milestone, the achievement of one or any number of milestones is no indicator of the extent of the project work that has been done or of the extent of project work remaining to be done, since separate milestones may require vastly different levels of effort. Thus, even with milestones, one has to estimate how much work remains, how many months it will require, and how many more dollars are to be spent before the project is completed. Furthermore, milestones do not consist of just the two-phase state of either being accomplished or not being accomplished; at any given time, many tasks are partially complete. It is impossible to separate the concept of project milestone achievement from the concept of percentage completion.

Despite the biases that may be present as a result of evaluating their own work, the engineers or scientists closest to the scene know the difficulties that have been encountered and have at least some feeling for the kinds of problems they expect to encounter before completing their own job. The engineer or scientist decides whether there is finding or failure to report and whether the job is adequately completed or unfinished. Organizations that push control down to the lowest possible level (to those people closest to the work) have obtained good results, because the professionals are concerned with their work and want to accomplish their technical mission. Thus the process of controlling must take into account the real source of control-the individual engineer or scientist.

In a technical organization, where highly trained and creative individuals function, then the source of many variances within an effort can be traced to people. However, one must be careful in applying strict controls over behaviors and personalities in the technical setting. People with technical skills do not want to be over controlled but need latitude to roam in and out of creative in innovative activity. Else, rigidity will stifle the very thing that is needed – problem solving by the application of creativity and innovation.

To close the control loop, the actions that organizations take as a result of their measurements of progress must now be considered. Problems arise in trying to decide what kind and how much action should be taken in response to deviations in the project progress. Should the program be revised? Should certain technical activities be increased or decreased to restore balance to the resource utilization on the project? The answers to these questions are almost impossible to determine categorically, since it is very difficult to compare with any real meaning the cumulative dollar cost with the scheduled project expenditures to date, or the effort allocation with the expected effort to date, or the anticipated technical achievement with the sensed achievement. For example, assessing performance based solely on a comparison of a planned expenditure curve and a budget curve does not allow an intelligent decision to be made because of the following questions:

1. Are the two curves compatible?

2. Do segments of both curves represent the same work?

3. Is there acceleration or deceleration of performance?

A finance department, observing that the expenditure curve is higher than the budget curve would immediately conclude an overrun condition whereas, based on the preceding questions, any of three possibilities could be occurring--0verrun, underrun, or on-budget. Therefore, the way in which management responds to indications of errors in job estimates is very critical to the advancement of technical projects.

There are basically two extreme response policies regarding off-target projects--0ptimistic response and panic response. Assume that management conducts periodic project reviews every 3 months. At the first review, only half the anticipated progress was made. How does management respond to this? Under the optimistic response , management suggests that this error only indicates some of the problems of getting the project underway and that there is no real reason to change the overall original estimate of project progress. They assume, "We always have problems when we’re just starting up." This same response is present at the next review, and the next, until finally maybe a year or two downstream, management must admit the problems and radically revise the requirements for the project. This managerial policy for responding to progress measurements, ignoring the error indications, could doom the project to failure or at least serious difficulties. However, the panic response approach dictates immediate response to any apparent error in the estimates as they show up in the project review sessions. At the first quarterly review, management changes radically its initial estimates and begins to take action, such as acquiring more people and facilities for the project. Once this approach is taken, momentum keeps it going and, if the project difficulties were really "due to difficulties of starting the project," ineffective ·utilization of resources results. This managerial policy forces overexpansion and wasteful haste in the job performance. ·

Of course, these responses are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and the actual management response can and should be somewhere between them. Without advocating either extreme, it is important to recognize the contrasts in the results produced by each approach. A technical organization’s response will be based on its own previous experience, its attitudes,