The Money Files

If you didn’t do it at the end of last year, now is definitely the time to acknowledge and celebrate project successes – things you did really well last year as a team. And it doesn’t matter how big they are, every small step in the right direction should be marked if you can!

Why celebrating wins is important

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that when a senior leader recognises the work you’ve done, it has a positive impact on morale and motivation. I can’t be the only one who thinks, “Ooh, I’ll file that email away for my end of year review.” That’s what you want to create: a sense of, “they think I’ve done a good job.”

Not everyone needs to be praised all the time, but celebrating wins also helps reinforce behaviours that are positive and shows that people are watching!

The biggest challenges I hear from project managers is that there isn’t enough time to celebrate success, and they don’t know what’s worth celebrating – is it just project completion? Well, it doesn’t have to be.

Here are some examples of project-related wins:

• Finishing a project (obviously)
• Meeting key milestones
• Signing a contract with a vendor
• Overcoming a major challenge, hurdle or issue
• Taking delivery of part of the equipment required
• Starting the work (good if you are literally breaking ground or clearing out a space – take before and after photos!)

Those are all tangible achievements but there are intangible ones too, such as resolving a problem with creative thinking, innovation, collaboration (especially if you can bring virtual colleagues into this one), and so on.

You can also think of wins that are specific to a particular person, for example, marking their one year anniversary on a project, or starting or completing a relevant training course.

How to do the celebrating

This is another area where people get stuck, because (surprise, surprise) there often isn’t any budget for marking celebrations during the project (and often not a project completion either, to be honest).

If you can, put some budget aside to allow for employee recognition. If that isn’t possible, tap into any employee recognition schemes that exist within the organisation and lean on those. Call out colleagues for recognition within team meetings, send digital cards or simply an email of thanks.

Record the successes

One thing you can do is create a ‘wins report’ which will sit alongside your lessons learned report at the end of a project as a reflection of all the cool stuff you achieved and how that work was acknowledged throughout the project.

If you’re in the kind of organisation where you want to share success stories with clients when you are pitching for work, you could also use your wins report as input to those.

Starting out 2025 with a reflection on what you achieved in 2024 is a good way to generate some momentum for the first few months and help people feel good about coming back to work after the festive break! How are you going to take this idea and bring it into your meetings over the coming weeks?

We’re almost at the end of quarter 1, so it’s time to reflect on how the first 3 months of the year. Here are some suggestions on what you could be doing now.

Reflect on personal goals

Did you set personal New Year’s resolutions? I’m not a big fan of resolutions as I think we can start new habits whenever, and January is a particularly bleak time of year in this part of the world, so not necessarily the best time to be trying to do new things when all you want to do is huddle under a blanket with hot chocolate.

However, maybe you did set some personal goals for this year, or a word of the year. How are you doing with that? If you’re doing well, how are you going to maintain that momentum? And if things haven’t started out as well as you would have hoped, how are you going to make the next 3 months any different?

Reflect on professional goals

This is also a good point to reflect on professional goals, like earning a certification. I have talked to people who wanted to achieve something (like sitting an exam) and then found the year has gone by so quickly they haven’t managed to make any time for it.

If the first 3 months of this year have sped past without you making up much ground on your professional goals, take a look at how you can break those down into smaller, achievable chunks and schedule the time to do the work.

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Reflect on your objectives

The professional development and performance management process in many organisations requires setting objectives at the beginning of the year. If you have had objectives set, it might be too early to have really made much progress towards fully achieving them.

However, you can make sure that you are clear about what they are, when they have to be achieved by, and what you should be doing to complete them. For example, schedule time for any courses you need to take, or block out some time to review progress monthly. If necessary, book quarterly reviews with your manager or mentor to go through the objectives and refresh them – I recommend getting these in the diary now as people’s calendars fill up remarkably quickly.

You might find it helpful to print out your objectives so you can carry them round with you or have them pinned up next to your desk. Then you’ll be able to check in regularly and remind yourself of the progress still required.

Another thing to start doing is making a note of the actions you have completed that count towards your performance review at the end of the year. Will you really remember what you did in February when you sit down with your manager in December or January next year? Probably not. Use this time (and block out an hour in your diary once a month) to update your objectives with a progress report.

Save any nice emails or examples of evidence you can use to show that you have achieved the objectives.

Get ready for quarter 2!

Next, put some time in your diary to do the exact same exercise in 3 months, when quarter 2 comes to a close. Regular reviews are an easy way to stay on top on your objectives – or at least identify where you are not able to meet the targets, giving you the chance to put plans into action or change them before it becomes a problem.

We’ve all got metrics we use to assess project success: cycle time, earned value and so on.

As the year ends, maybe it’s time to look at some other measures we could use that might be a bit more… dare I say… interesting? Below, I’ve suggested 7 alternative metrics you could put in place (some easily, some would take more thought and set up) to look at what project performance really means in the round.

1. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

You might find CSAT in use across other teams. Why not implement it for project management customers too? Even if you work in-house, you will have internal customers. Trust me, they have an opinion on the project management service you provide. Why not check in with them directly and ask for it?

You don’t need a formal CSAT tool. Set some survey questions and set up a form to ask stakeholders their views, and then collate the results.

2. Time to Value (TTV)

Cycle time is worth knowing, but does the end of your cycle always end in value delivered? A different way of thinking about it would be time to value: how quickly the project delivers tangible value per feature, or perhaps overall.

This metric comes with the added challenge of having to define value: but that could be a very useful exercise for stakeholders!

3. Innovation level

Could you create your own innovation index? There are already indices in use like the Global Innovation Index, but that’s probably overkill for our projects. Consider how innovative the product/deliverables are and the method used to implement them.

4. Resource utilization

Here’s one you can probably get from your project management software but I don’t see it on reports very often. What could you take from a utilization report? Metrics are only helpful if there is something you can use them for, like decision support. In this case, it would be making sure the team is adequately resourced, so you really want to be looking forward not backward. Although historical data is useful too to see if there is a trend towards over or under staffing.

5. Change adoption rate

Could you create a metric that looks at how quickly the organization is adopting new changes? If you work with a change manager, they might have some ideas about how to implement this. Any new process changes or anything that requires training could be included, even if your measure was only based on smiley faces!

6. Sustainability impact

Your procurement team might already have a sustainability index based on their work with vendors and a sustainable supply chain. If you have an energy team, they might have measures you can pull into your projects too. For example, how much carbon saving your project is creating, or how much waste is recycled from different locations.

7. Risk mitigation effectiveness

We mitigate risks, but are those actions really useful? We could draw on AI-powered insights by plugging in risk mitigation activities across a selection of risks and the outcomes. (Or you could work through this manually). I’m not sure how you’d assess the usefulness of the mitigation strategy: maybe on a scale of 1-5? Then you could see which actions had the biggest impact in reducing the risk.

There are lots of ways to measure project performance, and no one wants to be creating reports and tracking metrics for the sake of it. However, it might be worth looking at whether your current suite of metrics truly give you the complete, holistic picture of performance, because we all know it goes beyond time, cost and quality.

I have an electronic copy of the PMBOK® 7^th edition, so from time to time I open it up to check on something. Recently, I’ve been looking at different ways to forecast as we’ve got some work on that needs to be planned out.

There are 6 quantitative forecasting options called out in the Guide. These are as follows.

Estimate to complete (ETC)

This is top of the list and the one I personally use the most often. It works even if you are not in a full, compliant, earned value management environment. The risk here is that we assume past performance is indicative of future performance, and honestly, why wouldn’t you? Unless you know something is definitely going to change measurable performance, you would assume that work is going to continue at broadly the same rate. Just jot that down as an assumption so it’s transparent to everyone.

Estimate at completion (EAC)

For me, this goes hand in hand with ETC. It’s calculated by taking the actuals and adding the ETC, so again, while it comes under the umbrella of earned value acronyms, it’s completely accessible to those who don’t work in EV setting.

Variance at completion (VAC)

As forecasting tools go, this gives interesting data. It’s the measure that shows the amount of forecasted budget over or under at the end of the project, and it’s one most project sponsors will be interested in: “Will we have any cash left to do anything else when we’re finished?”

To-complete performance index (TCPI)

I have never had the opportunity (or reason) to use this forecasting metric. Perfect for those of you working with earned value day in, day out, it’s the cost performance required to meet whatever management target you’ve set for the work. It’s a ratio, so I think it is less meaningful to execs who are used to see tangible numbers of days or money.

Regression analysis

Now more and more tools are introducing AI features, it is possible to access regression analysis more easily. Perhaps you’ve got access to an AI-powered tool that will crunch these numbers for your automatically, removing the need for statistical knowledge.

The output allows you to predict performance going forward based on what has happened in the past, so it’s arguably more grounded than other guesstimates!

Throughput analysis

The final forecasting technique mentioned is throughput analysis. This looks at the number of items completed in a fixed time, so it’s useful for teams measuring features completed, velocity and story points. You can compare the output to those of other teams, although I’d be wary about comparing teams unless they work on very similar products or services. It wouldn’t be fair to judge a team on their throughput when dealing with very complex features against the performance of a team that has higher throughput but lower complexity.

However, the team can compare its performance against itself: that would be a worthwhile exercise. Ideally, you’d want to see that the learnings from retros have been fully incorporated and, more importantly, that the changes have actually made a difference.

Which of these are most used for your project forecasting? Let us know in the comments below!

You probably measure a range of things on your project. I’ve seen PMOs track number of open risks, projects closed this month and other numbers that are pretty much meaningless out of context. Here are 5 ways to make your metrics work better and give you more useful information, inspired by the Measuring What Matters report from PMI.

1. Measure more often

A study by PMI and PwC found that only 41% of PMOs were consistently measuring and reviewing performance. If you don’t measure regularly, how can you monitor trends?

They also found that around half of PMOs spent time communicating to the C-suite about milestones and project impacts. I know that in some organisations the PMO doesn’t have a direct line to the execs (although I think they should). Improving the perception of the PMO relies on the right people having the right information.

Action: Make sure you have a regular schedule for measurement so you can capture and track trends.

2. Collaborate up the organisation

Another thing highlighted by the PMO study was that metrics are often set by people who are not the PMO and who are not C-suite execs. Whether you are a project sponsor, senior leader or project manager, make sure you involve the right people in the conversation about what should be measured.

More collaboration between the PMO and delivery teams and the executives responsible for setting strategy should mean that you are measuring stuff that demonstrates whether the organisation is getting closer to the strategic goals.

Action: Check your measures are in line with the strategic vision for the company and that the right people were involved in coming up with them.

3. Focus on outcome-based measures

Outcome-based measures are those that reflect what was achieved on the project in terms of deliverables and change. They are different from the project management measures of time, cost and scope. (Note: those are still useful, but they aren’t the only thing you should be tracking.)

Projects exist to deliver change. That’s what is important: the impact that the work has on the organisation.

Action: Review the measures you are using to track your project and see which of them are outcome-based. Is that enough?

4. Review measures regularly – and with the right people

Once your measures are set up, keep them under review. Make sure to get input from a wide range of stakeholders: those who are collecting data for the measure, those who are using the measure for decision-making, the PMO and the project team, along with anyone else who has a stake in the outcome.

Reflect on whether the numbers or results are telling you what you thought they would. Do they provide accurate, reliable data that can be applied to different projects in a meaningful way? If not, why? Perhaps the measures need tweaking to make sure they properly serve their purpose.

Action: Schedule time to reflect on the usefulness of the measures you have in place.

5. Define success

Finally, define what success looks like. What parameters for your metrics represent a ‘good’ score? Below what level would you need management intervention? What are the red flags that would push the project into an Amber or Red status?

Capturing data is one thing – but being able to use it is something else entirely. In addition, some of the more ‘fluid’ desirable outcomes like cultural change or customer satisfaction are harder to grasp with a single number. You might need to combine several metrics to get a full picture of the current performance levels.

Action: Review the parameters that trigger action for your measures.