Monitoring and control

What is the difference between monitoring and control?

According to the PMBOK,
Monitoring includes "collecting, measuring and distributing performance information, and assessing measurements and trends to effects process improvements."

Control includes "determining corrective and preventive actions or replanning and following up action plans to determine if the actions taken resolved the performance issue."

The monitoring is taking the picture of the situation of a project, get the various measures and compare them with the key performance indicators.
The control is the corrective action that is undertaken if the performance is not the one expected or if there is a risk of having a problem in the future.

An activity is taing more time than planned: 5 days instead of 3. The measure of the 5 days by collection of te estimate to complete is the monitoring. Deciding that an additional resource will be put on the activity to finish on time is the control.

What's a project?

A simple question isn't it? So simple that it seems having no sense to define it again.
The PMBOK defines a project as :

"a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result."

• The most important point in this definition is "unique". This is also the main difference between a project and operations. The purpose of operations is to recreate the same product over and over. The uniqueness of an activity is however discutable. Creating a specific car one of its own with a specific unique color makes it a unique product. The car went through a manufacturing line that is enable to recreate the same base model. The only difference in this case is the color. And this is exactly the point. The manufacturing of the car is classic operations but the painting in a specific color becomes a project.

• An other important point is the "temporary". In a project, there must be a start date and an end date. An activity that has no spcific finish date is not a project. It could rather be considered as a maintenance.

• Let's have a look at the end deliverable of a project: "product, service or result". the end deliverable can be something tangible like a house, a bridge or a software. It can also be the improvement of a process, a transfer of knowledge or a successful trip on the other side of the street.