Total Project Control

Total Project Control (TPC) is a project-management method developed by Stephen Devaux, introduced in his 1999 book Total Project Control: A Manager's Guide to Integrated Project Planning, Measuring, and Tracking. Its central claim: projects should be managed as profit and investment centers, not just cost centers — continuously tracked and optimized for return on investment (ROI), not only for on-time/on-budget delivery.

What TPC builds on

TPC builds on established techniques — earned value management, the Critical Path Method (see Critical Path), and PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) — but extends them to track projected project profitability, not just the traditional cost and schedule metrics those techniques were originally built around.

Key concepts introduced by TPC

• Critical path drag — the amount of time a specific task on the critical path is actually adding to the total project duration; unlike plain float/slack (which measures a non-critical task's spare room), drag quantifies how much a critical task itself is costing the schedule, which tells a manager exactly how much schedule benefit would come from shortening that specific task.
• Value Breakdown Structure (VBS) — extends the familiar Work Breakdown Structure by attaching an explicit value (expected contribution to project ROI) to each work package, not just its cost and duration.
• Devaux's Index of Project Performance (DIPP) — a single index relating a project's expected value to its cost and schedule, tracked over time to show whether the project's profitability is improving or eroding as it progresses — not just whether it's on schedule/budget in isolation.
• Doubled Resource Estimated Duration (DRED) — an estimate of how much a task's duration could shrink if its assigned resources were doubled, used to judge whether adding resources to a specific critical-path task is actually worth the cost (see "crashing" in Critical Path).
• Cost of Leveling with Unresolved Bottlenecks (CLUB) — a metric for the cost incurred by resource-leveling decisions that don't actually resolve an underlying bottleneck, only shift it.

Why this differs from plain CPM/EVM

Plain Critical Path Method tracks schedule; plain earned value management tracks cost/schedule performance against a baseline. TPC's distinguishing move is treating the project's expected financial value itself as a live variable to manage — asking not just "are we on schedule" but "is accelerating (or delaying) this specific task worth what it costs, given what finishing sooner (or later) is actually worth to the business." Critical path drag and DIPP exist specifically to make that ROI-based tradeoff calculable rather than a matter of intuition.

Recognition

The Project Management Institute's PM Network magazine noted that TPC "makes solid points about what can be done to maximize ROI during project execution" — positioning it as a genuine extension of mainstream PM technique rather than a wholesale alternative to it.

Common pitfalls

• Confusing drag with float — float measures spare time on a non-critical task; drag measures how much a critical task is actually costing the schedule. They answer different questions and aren't interchangeable.
• Treating VBS/DIPP as replacing WBS/EVM — TPC is explicitly built as an extension of those established techniques, not a wholesale replacement; a team unfamiliar with the underlying CPM/EVM concepts will find TPC's additions hard to apply meaningfully.
• Optimizing schedule without checking ROI — TPC's whole premise is that a schedule optimization (e.g. crashing a task via DRED) is only worth doing if it actually improves DIPP; doing it purely because "faster is better" defeats the method's own point.

Learn more

• Wikipedia: Total project control — the source for this skill.
• Stephen Devaux, Total Project Control (1999) — the originating text.
• Critical Path for the underlying CPM concepts (float, crashing) TPC extends.
• Project Management for the broader project-management context.