2 Types of Measures

 

“There are two kinds of measures of use in managing a system: permanent and temporary,” writes John Seddon in Freedom from Command & Control: A better way to make the work work. “Permanent measures, those that are related to purpose, are the guiding measures for all performance-improvement work. Temporary measures are those that are useful in ascertaining the nature and size of a problem before action is taken.”

Seddon is an occupational psychologist who has spent his career trying to improve systems by taking the waste out of processes. One of the ways he has done this is by focusing on what gets measured, a kind of ‘What gets measured gets done’ approach to improvement. His work has no doubt resulted in a lot of projects, particularly those that relate to continuous process improvement, but his book doesn’t cover project environments particularly. Still, I think that the way he splits measures into these two types is relevant to project managers – and we are focusing on governance this month at ProjectManagement.com. Let’s take a closer look at the types of measures Seddon explores in his book.

Permanent measures

Permanent measures, are, as you have probably guessed by the name, permanent. As nothing much is permanent on a project, these are the kind of measures you are likely to find in your Project Management Office or Portfolio Office. They are the measures that help manage the work overall. Some examples of permanent measures are:

Capacity and demand. This can help with resource scheduling on an ongoing basis. It helps to know what work is due to complete and when project managers will be free to take on other projects.

End-to-end time. This is how long it takes to complete the work from the customer’s perspective. As not many projects are repetitive, this is a bit of a pointless measure on projects. However, if you are repeating similar initiatives over a period of time (such as rolling out new software to an office at a time), it can be very useful to know how long it takes to complete one implementation.

Accuracy. In a project environment, this would be covered by project audits. The ‘accuracy’ of a project could equate to scope items covered, fit with requirements or how customer-centric you are and how much value you create for customers.

Temporary measures

Temporary measures are those that don’t last long. They aren’t permanently built into the fabric of how companies report projects. As such, you could have temporary measures on your project, especially if your project has a RAG status of Red and is in trouble. If you are trying to rescue a failing project, you will want to gather some data on what has been done to date and how best you can recover the situation.

It’s less easy to see how Seddon’s examples of temporary measures relate to projects. Here they are.

Type and frequency of demand. This could be a PMO measure, especially if you are looking to recruit an additional project manager or more staff in other capacities. You could measure the type and frequency of demand over a short period of time to check that you really do have cause to hire someone. Equally, on your project, you could use this type of metric for resource management. For example, as you move into the testing phase your resource needs will change. This is something that you won’t measure when the project is over as staffing up to support the product is a task for the operational team.

Type and frequency of ‘dirt’ in input. Seddon is mainly writing about service organisations like call centres, so he means incomplete application forms, letters that don’t have enough information in and so on. In the world of projects, this could be things like project initiation forms that don’t have enough information in for the stakeholders to sign off the scope, incomplete business cases, requests for projects that appear in the form on an email with a good idea rather than a thought-through assessment for a new project etc. He recommends that a few small changes could make a big difference, such as changing the forms or template letters used. For example, you could amend the form on your company intranet so that it is rejected unless someone enters all the detail required to submit a new project for consideration.

Type and frequency of waste. ‘Waste’ to Seddon means steps in the process that don’t add any value. These could be things like handovers between teams, lost time, rework and errors. There are probably numerous places on a project or in your project management processes where things get lost or handoffs between teams are not as slick as they could be.

I’m a big believer in taking what we can from other areas of management practice and applying them to projects, so I think it is worth considering what we can learn from the type of metrics used in service organisations and the like. Do your project or PMO metrics fit any of these categories?