Project Evaluation and Selecting Project Metrics
Project Management Metrics a Tool for Project Process Improvement
Jan 27, 2009
The reasons for doing a project should be results-oriented and benefit driven and consequently there should be targeted benefit measures to demonstrate success. Ideally, benefits management will start the project and continue when the project has ended. Project metrics are in-process or project execution measures that are collected, analysed and used to drive project process improvement.
Reasons for Project Metrics
Project metrics require time and effort and so that work is done for usually one of these reasons:
- To provide clear and tangible project status information about project schedule and cost
- To identify areas for project process improvement
- To demonstrate the results of process improvement efforts
- To collect a database of project metrics to analyse trend information or provide historic comparators and perhaps used for parametric estimates
To collect project metrics without a clear plan of future action to use those metrics is simply wasting time and effort. In short, only collect project metrics that will be used to drive project process improvements.
Key Project Metrics
Senior management will often wish to see regular reports of project progress against time and cost measures. Some project management methodologies go into some detail with these metrics including planned versus forecast, cost variance, schedule variance and earned value. However, more generally, key project management metrics include:
- Schedule - delivery date and slippage in days from original delivery date
- Cost - actual budget versus original budget
- Resource - effort, how much time people have used on the project
- Scope - changes to project as measured through number and type of controlled changes made
- Quality - quality defects and documentation
- Software - a specialised subject with many potential measures such as lines of code, code complexity and function point
- Defects - number and type of problems or issues recorded for the technology project during its test stage and warranty period or a defined time period
Other metrics associated with normal operation such as availability, performance or support call resolution properly belong with service metrics rather than project metrics.
Using Project Metrics
Using project metrics is the critical key to ensuring that collecting metrics has been worthwhile. The intent of gathering project metrics is project process improvement and some possibilities include:
- Schedule - identify root causes for schedule slippage such as under-estimates for work or late delivery of vendor product or additional complexity of multi-vendor solution and co-ordination. This could lead to actions such as improving estimation techniques, include contingency for schedule slippage by third parties, project planning more co-ordination meetings for multi-vendor projects or redefined project escalation process
- Cost metrics - identify cost variance such as under-estimating supplier costs. This could lead to actions such as earlier contract negotiation or fixed price contracts
Similar root cause analysis and project process improvement can be done for other project metrics.
Project Evaluation
Project evaluation is a function of meeting original objectives for expected benefits and also the in-process project execution. Benefits should drive project initiation and so the key focus for project metrics should be to improve project processes. That is the real value of project metrics - the positive changes that they can drive, leading to more successful projects.
