Project Metrics

Metrics Based Management is something that is followed by most organizations. But how effective are these organizational metrics, or for that matter are the numbers collected at the project levels realistic. In my opinion these numbers are skewed to a very large extent.  These numbers could end up being rigged all along to make it more pleasant or in line with expectations. Alternatively lack of adequate knowledge or a conviction with regards to these measurements, at the bottom of the pyramid has further impaired the quality and dependability of these numbers.

What is the solution?

To begin with we need to understand that just as any two humans are dissimilar, two projects are different. Hence, how they are measured may also differ. So it is imperative that project team decides on what to measure, when to measure, & how to measure? Offcource before all of that, they need to have a shared understanding of why they need to measure.

That’s right. The Need for measurement, consider ourselves, are we better off today than we were yesterday? We all do know that we are better off, but how do we convince others about it? We might say we are earning more today than what we were earning yesterday, or we are more contended today with our lives when compared to the past. We generally demonstrate to the society our state of well being by some form of materialistic gains, or the society judges our wellbeing by some form of tangible gains and losses.

Similarly, we need some tangible measurements to show progress in projects over a period of time.Now, here are a few ideas to start working towards a meaningful measure for your project. This approach is a combination of the GQM (Goal-Question-Metric) Method and the Balanced Scorecard approach.

List down the goals of your project, Are they SMART enough? (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) For each Goal list down the strategies to fulfill the Goal, Next for each of the strategies list down the specific tasks that need to be performed, now for each task, ask the question how would you know when the task is completed? That is what you would be measuring or would be your scale of measurement. This is called the GQM Method. (this is my own interpretation, so I have simplified it for my own understanding)

Let us next look at the Balanced Scorecard Approach, Consider you are a member of a team currently involved in a project. How do you know that you are perfroming well? Let us suppose that the Performance needs to be evaluated every month,

In the past one month (or period under consideration)
a. What did we do? (Towards meeting the project goals)
b.How did we do it? (Did we improve on the way we do things?)
c.What did we learn? (Did we increase our ability to do similar tasks?)
d.What obstacles are we facing? (What Risks do we percieve? How do we mitigate them?)

On each of these questions above, get the views of the team, management & customer. Here we are trying to evaluate holistically from different viewpoints rather than just evaluating the deliverables. (As i said, this is my own interpretation…:-)  grossly simplified ... )

Within your project you could use both of these techniques to derive some meaningful measures.A good understanding among the Team about the need for measurement, would go a long way in improving the measurement process