You Manage What You Measure

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Organizational Project Management   Strategy  

PMI’s new research on Maximizing Project Success covers a lot of areas, and I strongly recommend that you read it. It contains some enlightening, and sometimes surprising, insights. In this article, I want to look at the section on measurement (Chapter 4 in the report).

Throughout the report, PMI uses the concept of the net project success score, or NPSS. They used a 10-point scale in their surveying to ask respondents to state whether their most recent project was successful. PMI categorized the responses as follows:

• 1-6: project was unsuccessful
• 7-8: project had mixed results
• 9-10: project was successful

The NPSS was then the percentage that indicated successful projects less the percentage for the unsuccessful ones, so higher is better. The differences in NPSS for different characteristics explored in the research was sometimes stark, and the measurement category showed that.

Know what success looks like
To quote Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

It seems basic to define what makes a project successful and then to ensure that there are ways to measure that performance, but there is clearly still room for improvement. 84% of respondents to the survey said that success criteria were defined up front. That’s good, but it still means around one in six…

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