A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts.
Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.
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The Accidental Product Manager: What project managers need to know
How healthy are your project finances?
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Date
In my last video, I talked about the cost of change. Today, I’m going to talk about the cost of metrics. That said, how much did it actually cost you to gather information about your project?
Now, project managers like metrics and I do because they are very useful for monitoring your project, controlling your project and diagnosing potential problems. So metrics can give you early warning of trends that show that there is a problem on the project that needs to be corrected. Those, they give you the control that you need because they can set boundaries around tolerance levels and they allow you to monitor progress effectively.
So metrics are good but you have to make sure that the amount of time you are spending on gathering that data actually is worth it for the value that you’re getting from those numbers.
Now in this book “Results without Authority,” Tom Kendrick writes “All diagnostic metrics even those you intend to collect only infrequently have an ongoing cost.” He says, “Select your metrics carefully choosing ones that provide useful data that you can use to guide and control your project without inappropriate cost or high potential for needlessly annoying your team.” And that’s something else to consider - not just the cost of actually the time and effort that it takes to gather that piece of project data that the amount of good will that you are eroding by continually badgering your team for information about progress, numbers, data on a regular basis especially if they cannot see that they are going anywhere. And that really is the hidden cost of gathering metrics.
Metrics do have a very valuable place in the world of projects but you do need to weigh that against the two different aspects of costs. Financially, how much is it costing you to gather them and on a good will basis, how much is it costing you in relying on the team to continually gather information?
Posted on: April 05, 2012 12:45 PM |
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