Abstract
In fairy tales and traditional romance movies, the story ended when the prince found his soul mate, married her, and rode off with her into the sunset. The ending caption said: “They lived happily ever after.” Well, we know that real life is not quite that simple; after the marriage comes the most difficult (and, one hopes, interesting) part. Similarly, a great project contract and plan is of little consequence without constant monitoring and control. Once the project is planned and underway, the project manager cannot simply ride away and assume that everything will go according to plan. To insure success, many project matters need to be monitored; if a matter deviates from the plan, then some form of control must be exerted to bring the situation back in line with the plan. In this chapter I discuss the many matters that need to be monitored for IT projects, how best to monitor each matter, and what type of control actions may be appropriate for each.