Process > Measuring Project Results

We need to learn and understand more about the potential of Business Intelligence. One of these gaps is being able to understand and communicate the value it brings to organizations. Like many of the other management disciplines, that value is often difficult to quantify. As a result, the lifespan of any given BI function is shorter or more limited than it should be.

A new global survey indicates disparities in the measurement and effectiveness of PMOs, leaving their value a great unknown.

All the project measures in the world are useless if the end result is not of high quality. But how do you quantify quality? What metrics measure how good something is? Agile practices respond by making quality part of the process rather than something you measure along the way.

Testing is not the same as quality, and it’s not a replacement for it either. Our writer hopes to help you identify some ways that you can improve how you manage quality on your own projects--and hammer home that if you plan for quality in the first place, you won’t need to spend so much time fixing the things that have gone wrong.

This will be the first in a series of articles that will look to provide the background of issues involved with managing an agile software development project under a traditionally linear and sequential project procurement process. Software development has been deliberately chosen for the example industry since that’s the domain for which agile is most typically used, but for those using agile in other industry domains, the general issues and proposed solution should work equally well within your industry.

Agile and earned value are inherently different approaches to managing projects, but they can complement each other in support of flexibility and bottom-line value. Here are three practical tips to help you bridge the gap between an agile approach and the earned value reports and measurements many organizations require.

A good plan tells you what done looks like on your project; the schedule defines the steps to get there. Here is an approach, grounded in activities and artifacts, that can improve the credibility of your schedule. It measures progress based on accomplishments rather than the passage of time and the consumption of resources.

A concerted effort to manage and document the realization of business benefits is an indispensible key to the success of any program. It requires a well-defined business case and a structured approach to measuring and tracking the planned benefits throughout the program lifecycle.

The Agile movement, which emerged from a need to rethink software development projects, has popularized a number of ideas that should be applied more broadly across the PM community. Many Agile principles complement “formal” methods such as earned value management, and can be readily implemented in traditional project environments.

What is maturity? Can an organization be considered mature if it does the wrong things well? What if it does the right things in the wrong way? The OPM3 business standard helps organizations become more mature. But misperceptions still exist about what “maturity” means. This issue is not explained in the standard itself and has never been written about by anyone, so what better place to do so than here and now?

How many people on your projects understand the specific roles and responsibilities that are assigned to them? A huge challenge in many organizations is that they fail to define a governance structure that includes the necessary measures to be practical. An effective structure needs to have well-defined roles and responsibilities that are understood and adopted. Without it, governance is a hollow shell.

What’s in your backlog: features or results? Creating a Results Backlog that clearly defines success--with measurable business objectives--will ensure your team stays focused on solving the right problem, not just the problem right.

In the concluding installment of our “5 Questions PMs Must Ask” series, we explore the fifth and final question: how do we know we are making progress? The answer requires measures of effectiveness and performance stated in tangible units that are meaningful to all stakeholders.

A new book provides practical guidance on improving the performance of business analysts by focusing on which measurements actually matter, and how to use the resulting data, instead of opinions, to identify problems and opportunities on the way to achieving performance gains.

Discussion on quality management has not evolved much since the mid-1990s. Within executive circles, the discussions are not about the importance of quality, but rather on what quality is, how it is achieved and how it can be measured. The issues surrounding quality seem focused on definition and approach rather than on need. What is quality? What does senior management expect from the quality process, and how do these expectations apply to IT? Read on...

Earned Value Management is not just fuzzy math, but you need to help people understand it. The problem is not in the math itself, but in the difficulty of explaining EVM to stakeholders who don’t understand the numbers and what they mean. How do you sell EVM to your stakeholders without focusing on the math? Here we look at EVM for the masses.

Using product quality to deliver business value in agile development is vital. This article provides a how-to for progressive change agents interested in delivering products that generate measurable business value for their customers and stakeholders. You’ll learn how product qualities differ from functions, how to identify the right ones, measure them and use improvements to drive business results.

PMOs are responsible for establishing standards--but what should those standards be? This article will explore a few of the things to consider when establishing a model for project process compliance.

Many companies struggle with justifying the need to maintain a project management office after it is established. But the onus is on the PMO itself. Here are five key performance indicators that PMOs should use to measure effectiveness and ensure alignment with the needs of the organization.

Instead of measuring quality, Agile enterprises commit to it by investing in integration and testing, developing a common language around quality, and nurturing motivated, disciplined teams. Ultimately, quality reigns when organizations value it as much as profitability and protect the agile processes that support it.

Successful business execution is dependent upon having timely and accurate financial information. But too often, little thought is put into how to present the data in a meaningful way. From a project or portfolio perspective, what does a C-Level executive expect to see from the PMO for actionable decision-making?

The typical response to tough economic times is for IT leaders to make across-the-board cuts. While the cost savings are immediate, they are drastic, one-time fixes that introduce risk and don't position the organization for future survival.

If you want to ensure that your organization can differentiate itself based on quality, you need to ensure that everyone is focused on achieving that goal. Quality goes far beyond the individual project, and this article looks at some of the steps needed to ensure that you are capable of delivering quality projects on a consistent basis.

Based on extensive analysis of three competing earned value management methods, a new book summarizes the merits of each. Here, an EVM practitioner reviews “Measuring Time, Improving Project Performance Using Earned Value Management.”

The science behind Scrum is the notion of Empirical Process Control, which that is derived from (and firmly rooted in) industrial process control theory--and applicable to the complexity of human process management that often derails project schedules. This article is outlines the foundations of EPC and how it drives empirically based team management.

There is a subtle but important difference between measuring outcomes and measuring people. So what should we measure? Here are five measures that can bring about extraordinary results.

A Performance Measurement Baseline can be used to determine if you have everything you need to complete your project, including money, time and resources. Here is an overview of what it looks like, along with some key related activities and desired outcomes to strengthen its credibility.

At the end of the day, the real measure of a PMO’s effectiveness is the degree to which it improves the speed, cost and consistency of project success. Here's how to evaluate that effectiveness.

In many organizations, process comes before people, and function over feasibility. No wonder people resist. And all the change management in the world won’t help if the stakeholder community lacks the skills to execute a new process. Here is guidance on putting people at the forefront of your process design efforts.

Velocity measures an agile team’s ability to execute, but it often gets misinterpreted or manipulated, which leads to hopeful hunches or downright bad decisions. Because a team's most recent sprint is most indicative of future performance, there's a way to calculate velocity that generates estimates you can use with confidence.

Former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli is credited as saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” To this we clearly might also arguably add a fourth: earned value. Here we explain its three deadly sins--those of omission, commission and deception.

There are five immutable principles of project management that must be addressed by project leaders and teams in order to succeed. In this new series, we begin with an overview of these principles before exploring in detail how you can put them to work in a variety of business and technical domains.

Although the role of the business stakeholder has evolved using agile as a methodology, the business need or pesky constraint typically remains for delivering functionality by a particular date. Hence, project success many times is still measured by delivering functionality by a pre-defined date to meet business goals. Here we offer some suggestions to try if your organization is using an agile methodology--yet expected to deliver a large-scale project that has the same constraints that have existed over time.

There's no problem with the standard equation for risk, but it’s only part of the story. In this article, we look beyond impact multiplied by probability and think about risk trends over time.

CMMI provides several models that organizations can use to identify best practices and organizational improvements. Studying the maturity models and researching earned value management readiness reveals a series of baby steps for organizations to adopt EVM.

The Project Management Institute’s Pulse of the Profession report offers data on organizational project management trends.

Organizations are expected to deliver more and more with less and less, and that has in part led to the growth of organizational project management. But in this writer's experience, organizations have not been able to define what a successful OPM model looks like. How do you maximize the return on Organizational PM?

A new study shows that more than a third of projects are at risk and, not surprising, a key factor for recovering troubled projects is the actions of the project managers.