Determine the Rate of Change on Your Project

March 18, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Change Management, Scheduling

Determine the Rate of Change on Your Project (#6 in the series Measuring Project Progress)
By Johanna Rothman

You may be working with people who are uncomfortable with velocity charts. Or, they may not believe the impact that some changes have on requirements. In that case, you can use a requirements change chart.

Major Requests vs. Minor Requests Changes

Figure 1: Requirements Changes by Week

In this case, I was the project manager. I had a simple criterion for deciding if the requirements change was major or minor. A minor change affected one module, and a major change required changes to more than one module. To make this decision, I used the principle that “interface changes between modules tend to create defects.”

In this chart there are lots of small changes—something most of us expect on projects. But we also encountered some major requirements changes late in the project (Week 22). When I saw these requirements changes, I was able to explain to senior management that either the project would be later than we expected or the number of defects would rise. But with these changes, it was clear that the original date and the original feature set with the small number of expected defects was not possible.

This original article can be found at: http://www.jrothman.com/Papers/are-we-there-yet.html

Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. Johanna is the author of Manage It!’Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management’. She is the coauthor of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management, and author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People. And, Johanna is a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference (http://www.ayeconference.com). You can see Johanna’s other writings at http://www.jrothman.com.

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