Project Monitoring and Controlling for ATA Solar Panel Installation Project

The ATA Case Study
Assessment 3
[Name]
[Student no.]
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A non-profit and non-government organization – ATA, has proposed a project of installing 100
solar panels in the faraway areas of Quelicai, East Timor. The proposed project includes project
plan preparation, funds collection and selection of beneficiaries. In this essay, two important
aspects of project management shall be discussed – project monitoring / controlling and
communication. Monitoring shall ensure that project always remain on track and should be
completed under the assigned budget and time. Two monitoring tools have been taken up to in
this essay for monitoring and controlling the ATA project – Project status dashboard and Gantt
chart.
Project status dashboard shall help in monitoring six critical aspects of ATA. First is the budget.
ATA is looking after 1000 solar panels which have a considerable cost. They are required to be
stored in a warehouse which also consumes a part of budget. With the help of dashboard, all the
costs shall be displayed there and project manager can point how many solar panels should be
ordered on which day without adding much cost to warehouse pricing. Being a non-profit
organization, ATA cannot afford to hire or bill extra hours for any human or non-human
resource. To resolve this, dashboard shall keep updating the number of hired resources and
number of hours they have or are working. This will help in predicting in case any resource is
required to complete the work on time. ATA also needs to be informed about the tasks
completed or in-progress to monitor whether the project is on schedule. For instance, if the after
receiving the panels, installation work is not started within 20 hours (La Trobe University, 2017),
then this status should be communicated to management so that necessary action can be taken to
avoid delays. Monitoring also includes keeping the information update regarding the number of
employees on project and what tasks have been assigned to them. For instance: if ATA finds that
5 labours and 5 plumbers are assigned a task of cleaning the panel then it can instantly de-
allocate the plumbers from that job and assigned a plumbing job to them. Even though, work
hours of cleaning task get increased but plumbers can be utilized for efficiently in dealing with
drilling job. This ensures that there is a fair distribution of workload.
Another efficient monitoring and controlling tool are Gantt chart. It uses a combination of charts
to track the progress of the project i.e. Tracking Gantt chart (Kerzner, 2017). It uses combination
of graphs for depicting the milestones and activities of the project. ATA needs to know at what
date solar panels shall be received or ordered on what date they shall be installed or which
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