I have been asked to draft a Project Health Check Process. Is there a specific metric used to carry out a health check of a project? Or do I look at the following areas within a project to guage whether the project is tracking well or there are major issues?
The metrics that you outline are the places to start. If you have a schedule/budget baseline you will be able to do some point in time analysis and forecasting on those items.
Dependant upon what the scope of the Health Check (and type of project, I am assuming that the project is an IT/application type project) you may want to expand your metrics to include the following…
Bug Fix Traffic; open vs. closed over time
Requirements Stability; baseline requirements vs. new requirements over time (accepted, implemented, deferred etc)
Customer Satisfaction; Send out a survey to stakeholders/customers etc.
Perhaps after the project is in production you will have the luxury of doing some MTBF analysis too.
Good luck.
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Hans RobbersSenior Director| SalesforceVlissingen, Netherlands
Candace
In additiion to what has been written before I suggest you also have a firm look at the ETC. How is it calculated and is it in line with the percentage of deliverables completed. .
Another area I would study is terms and conditions set in the contract which give you a good indication how the governance of the project will be organised
I have seen other posts and more or less that is what can be done to see the status and check the health of a Project. In addition to this and most important, you need to understand that project health is appx 20% what you have achieved so far and 80% of what is coming in future.
Risks, Budget, Stability of the application, Stakeholders satisfaction are very important considerations.
It is good to know the details about the stability of your application, the ratio between Open/Close bugs and its trend. More data will give you a very clear picture where you are going.
Please do check the impacts on your projects, they can hurt the stability.
