PROJECT CONTROL

“Project Control” is American word.
The project control mainly aims to provide the Project Supervision (and thus the Engineering Directorate, or the project office or the contracting authority, according to the situations) with elements to make, at the right time, all the decisions necessary to comply with the terms of the contract signed with the customer, regarding the content, the quality, the timeframe and the costs (expenses and revenues) ; thus, it is mainly a forecasting task (with a long-term perspective), integrating the technical, contractual and commercial dimensions of the project ; in the project reports, the snapshot of the situation is only a “must-have” to be able to forecast the further evolutions, detect the gaps towards the projections and decide on the appropriate measures.

Secondly, the project management must gather and have series of statistical data that are reliable and reusable to improve the preparation and the execution of future projects. An accurate and rigorous project control is necessary for the Senior Management to measure the programs profitability and to decide on strategic orientations.

The project management covers multidisciplinary and interdependent notions, including technical issues or problems related to cost and timeframe, but, most importantly, the project management cannot be, in any circumstances, decorrelated from customer and suppliers relationships.

It encompasses all the activities ensuring that the project is being executed in accordance with all the objectives.

A management system embraces:

• the estimate,
• the cost control,
• the timeframe and planning control,
• the resources management thanks to the project procedures,
• the dashboard preparation.

Source: translated from the project control dictionary published by the AFNOR

WORKFLOW

A workflow is the representation of a series of tasks or operations realized by a person, a group of people, an organism, etc. The “flow” word refers to the fact that the product or the document or the information passes from one step to the following one.

In French, the officially recommended term is “flux de travaux”. The terminological dictionary proposes “flux de travaux” or “automatisation des processus” (processes automation) as equivalents. We also find the locutions “operational flow” or “flux operationnel” used among the professionals.

In a practical point of view, the workflow is used for describing the approval process, the tasks that have to be allocated between the various stakeholders of a given process, the lead-times, the validation procedures and it is also used for providing each actor with the necessary information to the good execution of his/her task. The workflow also eases the follow-up and identifies the actors, précising their role and the vest way to fulfill it. For example, if we consider the process leading to the online publication of content, it is the modeling of the tasks realized by the whole editorial chain.

We call workflow management the modeling and the computerized management of all the tasks to be accomplished and of the different actors involved in the realization of an operational process (or “enterprise process”).

A workflow engine is a software application executing one or more workflow definitions. It is sometimes erroneously and simply referred to as “workflow”.

Source: translated from Setrag Khoshafian & Marek Buckiewicz, Groupware and workflow, 1998 (ISBN 9782225829260)

PROJECT

Complex system of stakeholders, resources and actions, deployed to answer to an elaborated demand aiming to satisfy the requirements of a contracting authority.

The project implies:

• having a physical or intellectual purpose,
• having actions to realize with given resources.

By assimilation, we also call Project:

• all the documents elaborated during the system realization,
• the group of people in charge of the system monitoring.

Source: translated from the project control dictionary published by the AFNOR

5S

5S is the name of a workplace organization method that uses a list of five Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, and shitsuke.

Transliterated or translated into English, they all start with the letter “S”. The list describes how to organize a work space for efficiency and effectiveness by identifying and storing the items used, maintaining the area and items, and sustaining the new order. The decision-making process usually comes from a dialogue about standardization, which builds understanding among employees of how they should do the work.

PERT

The program (or project) evaluation and review technique, commonly abbreviated PERT, is a statistical tool, used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project.

First developed by the United States Navy in the 1950s, it is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method (CPM).

PERT is a method to analyze the involved tasks in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project.

PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy’s Polaris nuclear submarine project. It was able to incorporate uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in projects where time is the major factor rather than cost. It is applied to very large-scale, one-time, complex, non-routine infrastructure and Research and Development projects. An example of this was for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble which applied PERT from 1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games.

This project model was the first of its kind, a revival for scientific management, founded by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism) and later refined by Henry Ford (Fordism). DuPont’s critical path method was invented at roughly the same time as PERT.

GANTT

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart, first developed by Karol Adamiecki in 1896, and independently by Henry Gantt in the 1910s, that illustrates a project schedule.

Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e., precedence network) relationships between activities. Gantt charts can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical “TODAY” line as shown here.

Although now regarded as a common charting technique, Gantt charts were considered revolutionary when first introduced.[1] This chart is also used in information technology to represent data that have been collected.

Kaizen

Kaizen, Japanese for “good change”. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, banking, and other industries.

By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality management teachers who visited the country. It has since spread throughout the world and is now being implemented in environments outside of business and productivity.

LEAN

Lean product development (LPD) is lean approach to meet the challenges of product development notably:

– Need for more innovative solutions
– Long development cycle times
– Many redevelopment cycles
– High development costs
– Long production cycle times
– High production costs

Arbre des causes

Un arbre des causes (arbre des faits) est un schéma se présentant sous la forme d’une arborescence, utilisé dans le domaine des risques professionnels pour mieux identifier a posteriori tous les faits nécessaires ayant abouti à un évènement indésirable (accident du travail, mais aussi défaillance d’un processus, etc.). Il s’agit donc surtout d’établir un diagramme de causes et effets.

Il existe deux méthodologies en matière d’analyse des risques :

1. une démarche a priori (démarche à visée ergonomique : l’incident ou l’accident n’a pas encore eu lieu : on évalue le rapport entre le travail prescrit et le travail réel afin d’en tirer les conséquences pour améliorer la situation de travail, ou encore dans le cas d’un processus : l’analyse des modes de défaillance de leurs effets et de leur criticité (AMDEC),
2. une démarche a posteriori (arbre des causes, analyse des causes profondes, etc.) : l’incident ou l’accident ayant eu lieu, on en recherche les liens de causalité explicites et/ou implicites).

Ces deux démarches sont complémentaires.

Cet article s’intéresse à la méthode de l’arbre des causes. Celle-ci est notamment utilisée dans les entreprises pour déterminer, de manière exhaustive, les causes d’un accident ou d’un incident, pour en établir les liens de causalité en vue de proposer des mesures de prévention qui éviteront la reproduction du même accident.