Project monitoring and control with an empirically grounded budget-release model

Project monitoring and control (PMC) is a process of measuring a project’s progress and taking corrective action when necessary to ensure successful project completion. However, most existing models lack empirical validation of their assumptions and effectiveness, which limits their practical use. We fill in this gap by using empirical data from 97 real projects to calibrate activity-duration distributions and assess activity-duration dependencies, integrating these empirical foundations into an enhanced PMC model. We further improve the model by incorporating budget-release timing constraints and introducing two new policies for crashing and fast-tracking based on a project’s specific time and cost characteristics. Extensive computational experiments using empirical and artificial data evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. Because the budget-release policies and corrective action types depend on project characteristics such as activity-duration dependencies and topological network structure, key insights from this study can be usefully applied by project managers as heuristics even without a detailed model of their project. • We provide empirical validations of project monitoring and control assumptions. • We examine how the size, timing and portion of budget-release impact project control. • The budget-release policies are examined on empirical and diverse artificial data. • The use of budget-release policies depends on cost profile and network structure.