Project Monitoring and Control:

Once the above steps are completed, the project monitoring and controlling process is utilized by project managers to ensure the team is making satisfactory progress to the project goals. The cause is to track all major project variables - cost, time, slope, and quality of deliverables.

Because of the above mentioned detail and precision needed in critical path analysis methodology, it is one of the most difficult tasks in the project management. In spite, of difficulties, these methodologies have found wide acceptance in manufacturing and various other sectors. In literature, various case studies are presented to demonstrate its successful application in military, banks, hotels, etc.

The popularity of network based scheduling can be attributed to its many benefits, especially its ease of use. Other benefits include the following:

1) It provides a visual display of the needed tasks and their temporal ordering, which makes it easy to see how tasks must be sequenced. It assists communication and cooperation among task teams because each team may see how its work affects that of other teams.

2) It provides a relatively precise estimate of the time required to complete the project at the proposed resource level.

3) It recognizes and highlights the tasks that are critical to keeping the project on schedule.

4) It provides a way for monitoring the project throughout its life cycle. As the project progresses, PERT/CPM easily identifies changes in which tasks are critical and how the expected completion date is affected.

5) It provides a convenient method for incorporating uncertainty regarding task times into the schedule, and it helps to evaluate the effect of this uncertainty on project completion time.

6) It provides a means for evaluating the time-cost trade-offs resulting from reallocating resources among tasks.