Lawrence TaxsonSenior Program Executive| USGVienna, Va, United States
We are in the process of standing up an Executive Level Program Management Review Board that will have the task of assessing the "health" of selected high priority projects across our organization, with a focus on delivery.
As we begin to stand up this new function, I was hoping to get your thoughts on a few key areas:
1) Since this board is at the highest level of the organization, we don't want to necessarily dictate how our teams run their projects, but rather we are more interested in the "health" of these efforts and how they are doing at delivering their capabilities. Where do you draw the governance line for this type of oversight? How would you assess health without micromanaging the project managers? What are some key differences in your approach to this?
2) Carrying on from the above theme, we have decided to have these projects assess health by using a "scorecard" approach that uses a variety of measures. I don't want our PMs to fill out another set of quad charts or status reports, but rather think of their efforts the way an executive might look at their work. I was wondering if anyone has used this approach before and if you have, what types of measures have you used?
As as example, I was thinking of the following:
- Schedule estimating - how many times does the team miss their planned dates
- Customer Satisfaction - does the customer immediately start using a capability; what is the user growth trend?
- How many change requests do you receive over a certain period of time?
Just looking for any additional measures that don't necessarily get into the micromanagement of projects, but rather focuses on the status and eventual outcome of delivery.
You'd want to have a balanced reporting approach which does not emphasize any single project delivery success criteria more than another. As such, while you would want to assess cost & schedule health, you'd also want to assess quality, stakeholder satisfaction (not just customer) and forecast vs. originally approved benefits.
Mark WarnerProject Manager| AURATucson, Az, United States
Another thing to keep in mind is the nature of the Board itself. Is their charter to simply review the status of projects? Or can they serve a function to help improve projects and the chances they succeed? We have an oversight board, and a few years ago we started proactively engaging their "help." I.e., we'd not only report on progress, status, risks/issues, etc., but we'd also actively solicit help from them. Was there is a support letter they could write to help grease some skids at our funding agency? Could they apply pressure to an external stakeholder who was holding up critical work? And so on. Ever since, our meetings with this group has elevated from a standard "reporting" scenario to one that is now much more helpful and collaborative in nature. Just a thought... Saving Changes...
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