Hi! I have been asked to establish PM specific goals for Project Management Effectiveness (scorecard from 1-10), Project Timeliness (score based on required deliverables) and Project Quality (project post mortem review on scale of 1-10). Has anyone developed a set of standards associated with my question. If so, would you be willing to share? Saving Changes...
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Bernard GorePortfolio, Programme & Project Professional| NZ PoliceWellington, New Zealand
Yes, I have, but no, sorry, can't share, as considered commercially sensitive information, and also would be misleading, as every organisation will be different.
Depending on the industry, the culture, and the desires of owners and executive management, the desired goals could be vastly different. You need to get hold of the organisation's strategy documents, and start form there to match what goals in terms of project performance would support best the strategy.
For example, an innovation-lead company such as Apple would have very different expectations to a very traditional wholesaling operation. Saving Changes...
Elizabeth HarrinDirector| RebelsGuideToPM.comLondon, England, United Kingdom
Yes, we have. I've documented it all in my book, Customer-Centric Project Management, and that has templates and other things in to help set up scorecards in your company (it's on Amazon or from the publisher's website - Gower).
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Roger, great post and one that has far more to it than meets the eyes.
I highly agree with Bernard's advice, "Depending on the industry, the culture, and the desires of owners and executive management, the desired goals could be vastly different." And I have read Elizabeth's book, Customer-Centric Project Management, and would highly recommend it. It is a great read and provides a context for successful project management that extends upon the traditional triple constraint approach to one of business results achieved, ie value to the organization.
Many people advocate these situational, business-driven, and customer-centric approaches to the practical application of project management. This in turn means that project management goals and scorecards in support of those goals must be driven by the project context and specifically the stakeholder bias for the project.
For example, consider a time-to-market (TTM) project where the stakeholder has a strong bias for time by way of meeting or besting a certain product of the project delivery date (to realize a time-sensitive product of the project benefit) while at the same time being relatively indifferent to cost. In such a project context, the stakeholder would not only be willing but may very well demand that measures be taken to meet the time expectation even if that means a significant cost overrun not to mention the use of aggressive scheduling techniques and negative buffering of task durations which would no doubt give the appearance of an overall project schedule miss though in reality the project was completed earlier than it would have been with normal, less aggressive scheduling.
Though the customer/stakeholder is well served by the aforementioned example, the project management goals and scorecard metrics could show that the project was poorly managed on account of missing cost and schedule measures.
I could go on and on with one example after another, but suffice it to say, the more that your project goals and scorecard measures are driven by the project context and the specific stakeholder bias for the project, the more relevant they will be. This also means that if your project management goals and scorecard measures are merely collected metrics that are independent of and not related to the project context and specific stakeholder bias, the more likely your project management goals and scorecards will not be an accurate measure of anything and may even contribute to undesired project management actions and behaviors. I see this all the time in PMO dashboards. It is a real problem and can create a real disconnect with how project people view projects as opposed to how business people view projects.
I am not aware of a standard for this (project management goals and scorecards) as this speaks more to the practical application of the various standards that we already have. By way of guidance, I would have the project management goals and scorecard measures be developed by the customer/stakeholder for the project. The PMO may provide some general guidelines to confirm the priorities of the customer/stakeholder, but I would not tee up specific answers for this in advance. Saving Changes...
First of all you mention goals, scorecard and standards. Projects can be measured in a variety of ways by building project success criteria into every project you manage.
In order to manage the linkage of business results to business strategy; you will need data from your organizations projects. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways in small, medium or larger projects.
PMOs are the catalyst to initiate the governance around the gathering of this information for your project portfolio. The Balanced Scorecard is a framework that can be used gather, measure, communicate and adjust.
Just so you know there is no one size fits all, template etc. it should be tailored to your organization.
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