Successful transport decision-making - Osmose

T10: Project monitoring
Vol 1 - Table of Contents
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How to monitor projects
Project monitoring involves the collection and collation of
information needed to assess whether the project is meeting its
objectives at each stage, within agreed resource constraints. It
is central to good project management, as it provides the
means of ensuring that the project is running to budget,
delivering outputs on schedule and meeting various
stakeholder expectations. As such, it should be built in from the
start, as a continuous activity.
The key elements of project monitoring comprise:
Measuring indicators
Tracking progress
Data collection and data storage
Outcome monitoring and evaluation are described in tool T11.
Aims
Project monitoring serves the following purposes:
Checking that resources are being consumed as per
budget;
Ensuring that agreed project outputs are being delivered on
time;
Ensuring that stakeholders are being appropriately
involved and that their expectations are being met, where
practical;
Ensuring that the processes of organisation and
engagement are running smoothly;
Alerting the management team to problems that might
trigger an ‘incident management’ response;
Identifying situations that require actions under ‘external
relations’; and
Providing cumulative experience on how to identify and
overcome barriers.
Useful hints
Most information required for project monitoring is being
collected by someone in the team - the key is to identify
sources and ensure collation in a timely manner;
Monitoring reports on inputs, process indicators and
outputs should be requested and reviewed on a regular
basis;
Key stakeholder groups should be kept informed of
progress, and how they might be affected by the next
stages of delivering the project;
Present the information in easy-to-digest formats (e.g.
graphs of performance against expectation) - this will
enable problems to be quickly spotted; and
One member of the team should be assigned responsibility
for project monitoring, and process monitoring should be
carried out on an on-going basis.
In practice
Gävle, Sweden
The three partners funding the project were very interested in
monitoring and influencing the project process. To achieve this a
regular project-report was expected from the project manager.
During implementation, approximately two meetings a year took
place between the three partners involved in the funding of the
project. A separate report for the cycle-group and for the technical
authority was also required. Furthermore short and informal checkups
took place by phone and email.
Göteborg, Sweden
Vision Lundby intended to increase the share of sustainable modes
and be used as a testing field for new 'soft measures' for creating
behavioural change. After finalising the testing of a certain method
the project manager had to prepare a short summary (minutes-like)
of the tested method. For the meetings between the project
manager and external partners minutes were drawn up. Overall the
monitoring of the process was quite informal as the project was
easily comprehensible and the partners trusted each other.
Graz, Austria
The preparation and introduction of the city-wide 30/50 kph scheme
was accompanied by extensive analyses which had two main
objectives:
To be well prepared for an anticipated lawsuit; and
To develop logical and convincing arguments for the institutional
and public marketing campaign.
External experts carried out the analysis which included technical
issues (average speed, exhaust emissions, noise emissions and
social acceptance, etc.) - investigated before and after introduction
of the scheme. This analysis could also be used to evaluate the
success of the project.
The first stage delivered prognoses gained from measuring trips and
theoretical models and provided arguments for the discussion. A
scientific confirmation of the significant benefits of the scheme was
drawn from the analyses after introduction and contributed to the
rapid increase in acceptance for the scheme from the public.
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