Cross-discipline · Course
Project Controls for Project Managers
A single-day course for project managers and programme directors who receive project controls outputs and need to know whether they’re being handed something credible or something that’s been dressed up to look credible. Not enough to do the work yourself — enough to grade it.
Who it is for
Built for these people.
- Project managers who work with planners, risk managers, and cost engineers but have never been one
- Programme directors who sign off on schedule, risk, and cost submissions and want a sharper lens
- Senior leaders and executives who consume monthly reports and need to know the right questions to ask
- Commercial and finance professionals who sit on delivery boards and want more confidence in project controls data
Outcomes
What you will walk away with.
- Read a Gantt chart and identify the signs of a schedule that has been managed for appearance rather than accuracy
- Understand critical path and total float well enough to ask the right questions when the critical path looks implausibly benign
- Read a QRA S-curve and tornado chart, understand P50 vs P80, and identify when a risk model is too narrow to be credible
- Read an Earned Value report, understand CPI and SPI, and spot the most common forms of EV gaming
- Know the questions that separate a good controls deliverable from a bad one in each discipline
- Have the vocabulary and confidence to push back on weak controls work without getting into a technical argument
Syllabus
Session by session.
Session 1 — How to Read a Schedule
2 hours- What a schedule is actually for: the difference between a planning tool and a reporting artefact
- Critical path in plain English: what it means, why it matters, and why it moves
- Total float: what a healthy amount looks like, what zero float everywhere means, and what a suspiciously long critical path means
- The signs of a schedule that has been managed for appearance: resource levelling abuse, excessive constraints, logic gaps, fabricated progress
- What to ask your planner: five questions that separate a credible schedule from a plausible-looking one
- Worked example: reading a real (anonymised) schedule and identifying the issues
Session 2 — How to Read a QRA
2 hours- What a QRA is trying to tell you and what it cannot tell you
- The S-curve: what the shape means, what P50 and P80 commit you to, and when the curve is suspiciously steep
- Tornado charts: what they show, how to read them, and why a tornado dominated by one risk is often a sign of a lazy model
- Red flags in QRA reports: ranges that are too narrow, risks that are never correlated, a P95 that is only 10% above P50
- The questions to ask your risk manager: what a credible QRA should be able to answer
- Worked example: reviewing a QRA executive summary and identifying what to probe
Session 3 — How to Read an Earned Value Report
2 hours- PV, EV, AC in one slide: what each represents and how to read them together
- CPI and SPI: what the numbers mean, what they don’t predict, and the danger of treating them as precise forecasts
- The Estimate at Completion: how it’s calculated, what assumptions it makes, and when to distrust it
- EVM gaming: the most common ways a team inflates EV to make the numbers look better, and how to spot them
- When to push back: the thresholds and patterns that should trigger a conversation with your cost engineer
- Worked example: reviewing a monthly EV report and identifying the questions to ask
Prerequisites
Before you join.
- Experience managing or overseeing projects at any scale — this is a practitioner course, not an introduction to project management
- No prior knowledge of P6, @Risk, or EVM required
- A healthy scepticism about project controls outputs is a prerequisite, not a barrier
What you get
Included with every seat.
- Access to all three live sessions with a practitioner instructor
- Recording of the full day, available for 12 months
- A one-page question guide for each discipline: schedule, QRA, and EV
- A SOMA certificate of completion for your CPD record
- Access to a post-course Q&A thread for follow-up questions
FAQs
The honest answers.
Will this make me able to do project controls work myself?
No, and that’s intentional. This course gives you enough fluency to recognise good work, ask the right questions, and call out weak deliverables. Doing the work — building schedules, running QRAs, setting up EVM systems — requires different training and a lot of practice. Our other courses cover that.
Is this suitable for senior leaders who don’t want a highly technical day?
Yes. The course is deliberately non-technical. We use plain English throughout and the examples are drawn from real programmes at board-report level. There is no software to install and no formulas to memorise. The focus is on judgement, not mechanics.
What if I miss a session?
Recordings are available within 24 hours. Each of the three sessions covers a different discipline, so if you miss one you can watch the recording and still get full value from the others.
Can I expense this?
Almost certainly. At £495 it is within standard professional development budgets and is relevant to any PM working on a project with formal controls requirements. We provide a VAT invoice.
Do you run this in-house?
Yes, and this course is particularly effective when run for a delivery board or project leadership team together — it creates a shared language and shared expectations. We can tailor the examples to your organisation’s own schedule and risk outputs. Contact us for a quote.
Is this aimed at a particular contract type or sector?
The examples are drawn primarily from UK infrastructure, construction, and defence, which is where SOMA works. The controls concepts are universal, but the contract references (NEC, JCT, FIDIC) and the regulatory context will resonate most with people working in those sectors.
Want to talk about training your team?
Tell us the shape of your programme and your team's level. We will come back with a recommendation that fits — open course, in-house, or a mix.