A model for variance-based exception reporting with user-defined criteria

Project control efforts are increasingly underbudgeted and understaffed. At the same time, there has been little innovation or improvement in project control reporting and analysis. Exception reporting, hardly a new concept, is too often still largely that: a concept. Most project control systems still generate lengthy and cumbersome reports that have little support for management by exception. In an age of increasing automation, construction management and control work processes have changed little. As a result, many of the benefits of automation are still to be realized. Project planning and control work processes consist of islands of information, knowledge and expertise. Communication and sharing of data between these islands of information are rarely automated. This limits the ability of project control systems to access various project data and generate intelligent reports for management use. Although functional groups (e.g. procurement, cost control, scheduling) may be chartered to perform the specific tasks under their purview, project management must attend to the project as a whole. Integrated project information enable management to assess how the different project functions are coming together to deliver the desired product. In the fragmented project information world of today, management has to relate the various data with little help from the different information systems. This study devised an exception reporting approach that can improve management's productivity. An enhanced and systematic exception reporting capability enables management to identify critical control points in most need of attention at a given point in time. This helps insure that management's limited time is prioritized so as to achieve the most cost-effective control. This research focused on construction labor cost exception reporting with user-defined criteria. Flexibility and versatility in ways of viewing labor performance data was a guiding theme. Multiplicity of reporting perspective was emphasized. The user must not be a slave to rigid query and reporting structures. Quite the opposite, the user must be able to frame the information in the manner which is most meaningful from where he/she sits. This research also emphasized the importance of looking beyond the immediate and the obvious. Insightful information may be available in seemingly unrelated sets of data.