Many of the well known engineering companies have disappeared and very few among the ones that have surfaced from acquisitions and mergers are able to implement basic controls procedures. Sound Project Management concepts are being lost and for many companies project control systems don’t go beyond buzzwords and PowerPoint presentations. Excessive time is spent in meetings because managers are unable to access basic project information.

In the last 15 years, the power of microcomputer to handle data has been multiplied by a factor of 1000. However, this increase of computer power has had very little impact on the way Project Controls are performed. Nowadays, it still takes about the same amount of time to produce a Project Monthly Report as it took 20 years ago. No new control method has emerged to take advantage of available computer power. There are very few “Project Controls Management” tools on the market many of them still based on old technology, none of them are really integrated. For scheduling, there are only two relevant packages that exist in the market: Project from Microsoft and P3/SureTrak from Primavera. The inadequacy of traditional project controls approach contributes in large part to today’s project failures. Management decisions continue to be made based on outdated information using control models from the 1970’s.

During the last decade while the manufacturing industry spent billions of dollars in information technology to improve productivity, the engineering and construction companies scraped their mainframe base Project Management Systems and spend only marginal amount of money to replace them.
Today most Project Control work is done using spreadsheets and word processing which is a legacy of the 1980’s. The result is tremendous inefficiency due to duplication of data combined with the inability of engineering companies to transfer the experience acquired to a new generation of programs.

Also because of lack of training, most of the Project Controls professional whose skills should have included data manipulation are unable to use basic database technology. Yet another consequence of the spreadsheet legacy is the lack of centralized project history data and standard work methodology causing each new project to start from scratch.