Over the last few weeks I’ve looked at why continuous improvement matters in project management, how we create the right culture for it and what tools we’ve got available to do it (lots, fortunately).
Now, I want to look at how you can check to see if those improvement opportunities are having the effect you expected. Again, we have project management tools and techniques readily available for this because we have methods for benefits realisation and tracking. And those are the kind of things you can draw on for tracking.
But first, we have to start off with some metrics.
What metrics are you going to use?
All benefits tracking relies on having something to track against, so when you are planning your improvement initiatives, it’s important to think about what you are going to use to track. How will you know if the change has been successful?
In reality, some of the changes are going to be small and you wouldn’t track them. For example, I removed a section of a template that was no longer relevant – I’m not going to set up tracking to establish whether or not that was worth it. It was worth it. If in the future we decide we want it back in (we won’t), we can add it back in.
But there are other changes where it is worth measuring the impact, especially if you have to justify the change in some way. For example, if you need investment to make the change (like a change to your software tool or to pull chargeable resource off a chargeable project to do an internal change) then you’ll want to track.
You could look for:
Process efficiency metrics: Track changes in key process metrics, such as time to completion, resource usage, and cost savings. Ideally, you would want to see a reduction in time or cost per task. So you have to have ways to track that today, and not be implementing anything else at the same time that would also affect the metric.
Quality improvements: Measure the improvement in project deliverables, such as defect rates or rework levels. You’re looking for a decrease in errors or bugs. For example, if you’ve implemented improvements to software testing or pair programming.
Team engagement: If you have employee satisfaction surveys you could use those results. Or you could look at team retention rates, or the number of improvement suggestions submitted by team members as an indicator of engagement with the continuous improvement process. However, a lot of factors influence engagement, so it’s hard to say with confidence that it’s the changes that have been made that have had a significant (or any) impact on engagement and morale. Also, the impact diminishes over time. While people might start out thinking the change is amazing, over time it just becomes ‘the way we do things around here’ and people start to take it for granted.
Assessing the impact
You’ll need to find a way to track performance before and after. Alternatively, consider benchmarking against other organisations. I’d only suggest doing this if you already have access to the information. When we’ve run a benchmarking exercise, it’s been expensive and I’m not sure it gave us the level of detail that would help with project management continuous improvement. So I personally wouldn’t be recommending that we invest in benchmarking unless it was for something bigger, like an assessment of PMO maturity against industry competitors.
Anyway, I digress.
Qualitative measures
It’s also OK to go for qualitative measures like stakeholder feedback. Ask if they think your improvements have made a difference.
However, it also might be positive if they haven’t noticed a difference. That means your change has gone in so smoothly that it is transparent to stakeholders, and that might be a good thing!
Be sure to ask the team as well. Continuous feedback loops are useful, and basically that just means talking to people about how the change has impacted them and listening to their feedback.
I’m enjoying writing about continuous improvement, and next time I’m going to cover some of the challenges that you might face while trying to make project management process improvements, with perhaps a few tips on how to overcome those. See you then!
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