Project Scheduling and Monitoring in Indian Government Departments: Findings and Implications from Indian Case Studies

Project Scheduling and Monitoring is an integral part of working in many government departments world-wide. In our present exploratory study, we take an overview of these through case studies of two large scale civil projects in the Indian context. We focus on administrative set-up, project activities and processes, personnel and resources deployment, project scheduling and monitoring of a road construction project and a multi-level parking project using traditional project management tools such as Gantt Charts and CPM network deriving important managerial and policy implications. We observe that most stages of product development life-cycle are followed creating automatic quality control mechanisms. However, tendering and other bureaucratic processes consume 20-40% of the actual project time. Further, most activities being sequential with very little slack time make parallelization of activities difficult. So, managers and policy-makers need to look for ways to reduce the bureaucratic clearance times and to make certain project activities concurrent.