« 2008 Resolutions for IT Portfolio Management & Project Portfolio Management Vendors & Consultants
Business Analysis and Project Management – Part III - Using Soft Skills To Your Advantage »

Does your project have Measuritis?

January 15, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Performance Reporting

Does your project have Measuritis?
By Rich Maltzman, PMP

Measuritis is a chronic viral condition in which your management, your project office, or perhaps even you are obsessed with numerical measurements of everything that can possibly have a number associated with it. My favorite Measuritis story is this one (partially because it’s true).

My colleague and I were each leading project groups. We each had about 10 project managers overseeing important equipment and network deployments. Each week, we produced a report which gave a progress report on each project. Problem was, our director kept asking for the data to be reconfigured in different ways (he didn’t have the software skills to reconfigure these himself). So he would continually ask for the data to be reported every which way. To try to show him the error of his ways, we created a special report which listed the various reports we were generating for him. On this “report report” as we sarcastically called it, we listed the various reports we were issuing for him, with what frequency, and which audience.
Well, instead of getting our intended message, our esteemed manager reacted like this: “Gentlemen, that report is very nice. I’d like to see it produced once a week”.

I took two lessons learned from this episode:

  1. Sarcasm is often lost on your “victim” and instead, you become the victim.
  2. There are different varieties of Measuritis. In this case it was a particularly deadly strain of the virus called reportata overlodum.

My experience in talking with those who run project offices also provides plenty of examples of Measuritis infection. In the quest for KPIs (Key Performance Indices), all that can be measured, is. And that’s not the real problem - the problem is the credence that is given to the numbers calculated from these measurements. Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to project dashboards and KPIs in general. What I am saying is that it makes sense to be extremely thoughtful and careful when establishing the measurements and very important to consider the intangibles. I know that “you cannot fix what you don’t measure”, but you also must be aware of what you cannot measure and account for it in the mix.

I am hoping to start a conversation on this subject, via people responding to this posting. Don’t worry, I have had Blogger install an anti-measuritis anti-virus pattern; your project will not be contaminated. Also, I promise not to generate pie-charts, trend data, or radar diagrams showing the number of postings per unit time…

For your reference I provide the following resource: A very short article which discusses the merits of devising project measurements.

Rich Maltzman, PMP, has 30 years of industry experience, the last 20 of which have been in project management. Currently a Senior Manager for a large multinational corporation’s Global PMO, Rich has also been developing and delivering project management courseware and PMP prep packages for Boston University’s Corporate Education Center and mScholar. In addition, he and co-author Ranjit Biswas, PMP, are the lead authors, along with all of you out there, of the book, Fiddler on the Project, to be published in 2008, via its crowdsourced wiki site, http://fiddlerontheproject.bluwiki.org. You are invited to write it with them. You can also visit Rich’s blog at www.scopecrepe.blogspot.com.

Share this article:
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Reddit
  • YahooMyWeb
  • blogmarks

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 and is filed under Performance Reporting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

[…] The point is that organizations need to be cautious of Hero Worship. I know I have written about Measuritis, calling for us to be careful about what we measure, but here is a place where your key performance […]

PM Hut » Hero Worship wrote on January 21, 2008 - 8:40 pm | Visit Link

A report about reports…this is hilarious. It should have been in the move “Office Space” I know exactly what you mean Rich. Stakeholders that refuse to think for themselves often rely on reports that basically tell them nothing in exchange for the warm blanket of junk data. Unfortunately, they tie up good free thinking resources in the process. And, instead of using reports to make decisions, they use it to discuss decisions that have not been made. It is another disease that I call Decision Paralysis. It’s very contagious and can be fatal to the business unit.

StockTheMind Consulting and Training wrote on March 28, 2008 - 9:34 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories