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Project baseline scheduling, risk analysis and project control are crucial steps in the life of a project. The project manager uses the project schedule to help planning, executing and controlling project activities and to track and monitor the progress of the project. A major component of a project schedule is a work breakdown structure (WBS). However, the basic critical path method (CPM) schedules, or its often more sophisticated extensions, are nothing more than the starting point for schedule management. Information about the sensitivity of the various parts of the schedule, quantified in schedule risk numbers or of a more qualitative nature, offers an extra opportunity to increase the accuracy of the schedules and might serve as an additional tool to improve project monitoring and tracking. Consequently, project scheduling and monitoring/control tools and techniques should give project managers access to real-time data including activity sensitivity, project completion percentages, actuals and forecasts on time and cost in order to gain a better understanding of the overall project performance and to be able to make faster and more effective corrective decisions. All this requires understandable project performance dashboards that visualize important key project metrics that quickly reveal information on time and cost deviations at the project level or the activity level. During monitoring and tracking, the project manager should use all this information and should set thresholds on the project level or on lower WBS levels to receive warning signals during project execution. These thresholds serve as triggers to take, when exceeded, corrective actions.



