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Lab 22 — Monitoring and Corrective Action

At a glance

Learning objectives

By the end of this lab you should be able to:

  1. Read leading indicators from delivery data and separate signal from noise.
  2. Diagnose a cause from evidence rather than from assumption.
  3. Specify a corrective action with an owner, a date, and a verification test.
  4. Decide whether a variance requires escalation, using pre-agreed tolerances.

Scenario

This lab continues the Public Service Complaint Management System from Lab 12. The project is four weeks into a fourteen-month schedule, in its first delivery increment.

Delivery facts:

Item Value
Budget at completion (BAC) PKR 360,000 (first increment)
Work-in-progress limit 4 items at once
Planned throughput 5 completed items per week
Team 6 in the first increment
Cost tolerance ±5% of the increment budget
Schedule tolerance ±3 days on any milestone

Weekly delivery data:

Week Completed (plan) Completed (actual) WIP at week end Items blocked Defects found in review Defects escaped to users
1 5 4 3 0 2 0
2 5 5 5 1 2 0
3 5 3 6 3 1 1
4 5 4 6 4 1 1

Earned value at the end of week 4:

Measure Value
Planned value (PV) 120,000
Earned value (EV) 96,000
Actual cost (AC) 105,000

Context from the team, gathered in conversations this week:

  • The integration environment was unavailable for two and a half days in week 3 because another project held it. Nobody had booked it.
  • There is one reviewer who can approve changes to the complaints routing module. All work touching routing queues behind that person.
  • Two of the blocked items are waiting on a municipal department to confirm their complaint categories — a stakeholder dependency, not a technical one.
  • A developer was reassigned to production support for one day in week 3.

Your role

You are the project manager. The steering committee meets in three days and the sponsor has asked whether the project is "in trouble". You must answer from the data, not from impression.

Project information and assumptions

The scenario is part of the example-project library — read the full description there if you want the wider context.

  • WIP, cycle time, and throughput are leading indicators; completed count and milestone slips are lagging.
  • A blocked item is one that cannot progress for a reason outside the team's control in that week.
  • Treat the WIP limit of 4 as a control the team agreed, not as a target to be approached.
  • Assume the earned value figures are based on accepted, completed items.

Tasks

Task 1 — Build the trend, not the snapshot

Produce a trend table covering all four weeks for: throughput vs plan, cumulative completed vs plan, WIP vs limit, blocked count, and defect escape rate.

Then answer, for each indicator:

  1. Whether it is a leading or lagging indicator.
  2. The direction of travel across the four weeks.
  3. Whether the movement is signal or noise — and for any indicator you call noise, say what evidence would change your mind.

Task 2 — Calculate the earned value position

For week 4, calculate SV, CV, SPI, CPI, EAC, and VAC. Show the arithmetic.

Then answer:

  1. Does the cost variance breach the ±5% tolerance? Show the percentage.
  2. What does the SPI figure tell you that the completed-count trend already told you? What does it add?
  3. State the projected final cost as a range, explaining what makes one end of the range more likely than the other.

Task 3 — Diagnose the cause

The data shows throughput dipping in week 3 and WIP rising from week 2. Write a diagnosis of no more than 150 words that:

  1. States the primary cause.
  2. States the secondary cause.
  3. Distinguishes the two, and explains why the distinction matters for what you fix first.
  4. States which of the two is inside the project's control.

Then answer: which of your two causes would have been visible from the WIP data alone, one week earlier, and what would you have had to be watching to see it?

Task 4 — Specify the corrective action

For each cause, write a corrective action with all five fields:

Field Content
Cause addressed
Action Specific and observable
Owner Role, with the authority to do it
Due date Within the next two weeks
Verification The observation that will show the action worked, and when

Then answer:

  1. For each action, is this corrective action (execution fixed, plan unchanged) or replanning? Justify.
  2. Which action is the project manager able to take alone, and which needs someone else's authority?
  3. What would you do if the municipal department does not confirm categories within a week?

Task 5 — Design the verification

An unverified action is indistinguishable from no action. For your primary cause:

  1. State the indicator you will watch, and its current value.
  2. State the value you expect within two weeks if the action worked.
  3. State the value that would tell you the action failed, and what you would do then.
  4. Name the date on which you will make that judgement.

Task 6 — Decide on escalation

  1. State whether the current cost variance is within tolerance, and the trigger for escalation.
  2. State whether the schedule variance breaches the ±3-day milestone tolerance, using the completed-count shortfall to justify your figure.
  3. Decide: escalate now, escalate at the next scheduled report, or handle within the team. Justify with your numbers.
  4. Write the escalation in three parts — fact, assessment with a number, request — in no more than 120 words.

Task 7 — State what you will not do

The sponsor's instinct under pressure is to ask for more items to be started at once. Write two or three sentences explaining, using this week's data, why that would make the situation worse rather than better. Then state the one thing you would ask the sponsor for instead.

Deliverable

  1. The trend table with leading/lagging, direction, and signal-versus-noise judgements.
  2. The earned value position with all six calculations and the three answers.
  3. A 150-word diagnosis with primary and secondary causes.
  4. The corrective action table with all five fields per action, plus the three answers.
  5. The verification design with the four statements.
  6. The escalation decision and the 120-word escalation.
  7. The "what you will not do" explanation and the counter-request.

Hints and guidance

  • The leading indicators moved first. WIP was above the limit in week 2 while throughput was still on plan. That was the warning, and it was visible a week before the throughput dip.
  • Rising WIP with flat throughput means a queue, not a surge of work. Queues delay everything behind them, including work that is not blocked.
  • Two causes need two actions, and their costs are different. The environment is inside the project's control and can be booked; the municipal department is not.
  • Verification needs a falsifying value. "We will see improvement" cannot fail and therefore cannot inform you.
  • Starting more work is the classic wrong response. It raises WIP, lengthens the queue, and lowers throughput further.

Self-check criteria

Check How to verify it
Trend covers all four weeks No week omitted from any indicator
Leading versus lagging stated for each Five indicators classified
EVM arithmetic correct SV −24,000; CV −9,000; SPI 0.80; CPI 0.91
Tolerance compared with a percentage Cost variance ≈ 8.6% of PV, or ≈ 3.75% of the increment budget — state which base you used
Diagnosis names two distinct causes Environment and single reviewer, with the stakeholder dependency identified separately
Actions have verification tests Each action has a measurable expected value and a date
Corrective vs replanning distinguished Each action classified with a justification
Escalation uses fact, assessment, request All three parts present, with numbers
Counter-request is specific It names something the sponsor can actually do

Reflection

  1. WIP was above the agreed limit for three consecutive weeks. What does that say about the control, and what would you change about how it is monitored?
  2. The single reviewer is a classic constraint. Would adding a second reviewer have helped without also fixing the environment? Answer for both sequences.
  3. One of the two causes is a stakeholder dependency. Does that make it a communication problem, a scheduling problem, or both?
  4. Write one sentence for the next status report that would let the sponsor understand the situation without either alarming or reassuring them inaccurately.
Check your numbers

Earned value at week 4

Indicator Calculation Value
SV 96,000 − 120,000 −24,000
CV 96,000 − 105,000 −9,000
SPI 96,000 ÷ 120,000 0.80
CPI 96,000 ÷ 105,000 0.91
EAC 360,000 ÷ 0.91 ≈ 393,750
VAC 360,000 − 393,750 ≈ −33,750

Cumulative completed: 4 + 5 + 3 + 4 = 16 of 20 planned — 80%, which matches SPI exactly. That agreement is a useful cross-check: the count and the earned value tell the same story.

Milestone shortfall: 4 items short of plan. At a planned 5 items per week, that is roughly 0.8 weeks, or about 4 working days behind — beyond the ±3-day milestone tolerance.

Cost variance as a percentage: 9,000 ÷ 120,000 = 7.5% of planned value at this point, and 9,000 ÷ 393,750 of the forecast total ≈ 2.3%. Against the increment budget of 360,000 it is 2.5%. State which base you used: the ±5% tolerance is defined against the budget, so on that basis the variance is inside tolerance — but the trend is what matters, and it is deteriorating.

Full working is in the Advanced labs answer key.

Extension challenge

Add a week 5 to the data set consistent with your corrective actions having worked, and record what each indicator should read. Then add a week 6 in which one indicator regresses, and write the one-paragraph note you would send the sponsor explaining why a single regressing indicator does not justify abandoning the corrective approach — using your own week 1–4 data to show that one week of movement is not a trend.