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Measuring Project Progress - Use Multi-dimension Measurements
March 2, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, Performance Reporting
Measuring Project Progress - Use Multi-dimension Measurements (#1 in the series Measuring Project Progress)
By Johanna Rothman
It’s easy to measure some facets of a project, such as the project start date, the current date, and the desired release date and say, “We’re X percent of the way along,” because the project team has used that percentage of time. But if all you measure is the schedule, you’re almost guaranteed not to meet the desired deadline.
I like to measure a project along at least four out of six dimensions. I think of this as a project pyramid. (See Figure 1.)
The outside of the pyramid represents the constraints under which management has approved and funded the project. These project constraints are the work environment, the people and their capabilities, and the proposed project cost. I call them constraints because senior management tends to fix these attributes early in the project, and they tend to be difficult to change. Cost is the most likely to change, but in my experience it changes only when it becomes clear that the team can’t meet the desired deadline.
The project requirements are what your customers care about. (And yes, if you work in an IT group, it is likely that your customers are the same people who constrained the project’s cost, people, and environment.) Your customers care about what you’re going to deliver (the feature set), when they’ll receive it (time to release, the schedule), and how good that stuff is (defects). If you measure all sides of the pyramid, you will see a truer picture of your project than if you measure only one thing, such as schedule or defects, the two most common measurements I see.
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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2 people have left comments
[...] using several measurements around the project pyramid, you can measure project completion. Project completion is a function of how accurate your original [...]
Johanna,
What are the units of measure for th4e sides of this pyramid?
What is the unit of measure for environment? What are the relationships - drivers - between the units of measure?
How do the lines in the pyramid influence each other?
Are these influences multiplicative, additive, linear, non-linear?