Is Too Much Control Counterproductive?

Project management control monitors, measures, and evaluates progress. When something isn’t going right, the control process is there with a solution to correct whatever is going wrong and get the project back on track. Control manages the budget of a project as well. Control is a necessary step if any project manager wants to maintain the balance between scope, time, and cost.

The only thing that guidelines do is offer guidance on certain situations. For a project to be executed successfully, there have to be far more checkpoints. Following guidelines wouldn’t check the progress of a project, track if the budget is on track, or other things that need quality controls and metrics.

When executing a large project, it important to have that management there to tell you what needs to happen and when it needs to happen and what needs to be done. Each situation would have to be dealt with in a specific way. The proper standards and guidelines that would have to be established for the team to references would be huge, and that’s if every little detail was even able to be identified. Team members would spend more time caught up in text trying to figure out what to do because everything is going wrong than they would actually working to execute the project.

Too much control is not counterproductive. Control helps members of the team to execute the project properly. It monitors and measures the work being done and send up red flag when something goes wrong. If it is corrected as soon as possible, less time will have been wasted. Control helps to ensure that all of the work that is being done is productive and necessary to the end goal.