IT Project Mechanic

Do you know how your project’s performing? Are you sure???

Measuring project results occurs in every project – task completion, performance to schedule, etc. Many PMs, managers and leaders believe that the efforts they are making toward measuring project results are “good enough”. There are, however, potentially fatal mistakes (figuratively) that can be made in managing the data collection and analysis of project measurement results. You can’t manage what you can’t measure is almost a cliché – but this saying has never been more appropriate.

So how do you avoid the 7 deadly sins of measuring project results? Knowing what to avoid or stop doing is half the battle. If any of these sound familiar – stop it! Set out at the beginning of your projects to define a data collection & measurement plan and strategically develop your method to measure your project’s success.

Here they are:

7. Catch and release – measuring data that’s never used. A common practice among PMs and project leaders at all levels are to define project measurements and capture the data. Then, nothing happens. The data sits there and is never used. This is a waste of time and energy that is easy to fix. Stop wasting your data! If you find that once you’re analyzing the measurement s captured they don’t yield accurate results, set them aside and try another test run. You never know when the seemingly meaningless information of today is invaluable tomorrow.

6. Intermittent measurement. Where catch and release doesn’t utilize available data, intermittent measurement simply fails to consistently capture measurement data. If you’re like me, this happens from time to time and is almost always unintentional. Inconsistent measurement data, however, is worse than no data at all. You can extract results that are biased or just flat wrong. Gain more regular control of the measurement cycle and regularly capture your information.

5. Measuring without a plan. You’re capturing regular data and you’re using it. How are you using it? This regularly causes lots of pain and confusion when projects have metrics that aren’t based on a plan or a structured results methodology. Imagine you’re on a trip across country and you’re measuring distance, fuel consumption and green compact cars. Do these measurements tell you how successful your trip project will be? Some do – some others, not so much. Your measurement data types should make sense to paint a complete picture of your project’s result.

4. Manually capturing data when automated capture is available. Most of the time when I see data being captured manually the cause boils down to, “We’re too busy to figure out how to get this from our system” or “We can’t get this from the system. This is most often junk – if you can measure it by hand, you can probably better measure it via a system. Take the time to eliminate most of your manual measuring systems wherever possible. Use internet survey tools to gather qualitative customer data and computer based systems to measure quantitative data. If you simply can’t get the measurement any other way, do what you can to remove human bias and bad data.

3. Relying on measures that don’t reveal the true results. Ever been in the position where you know you’re forecasted results and then the truth reveals something different? Frequently, I watch colleagues blindly measure data without ensuring that information will reveal valid results. You can solve this by testing early and often – if you can’t prove early on the results meet the intent, record your results and try another route.

2. Relying on existing measures without understanding them. I’ve been caught here a few times – inheriting a project that’s underway and the measurement systems as well. If you don’t understand what you’re supposed to get from the data, or how the measurement information is supposed to reveal this information, stop! Figure it out and make sure you’re getting the right information to reveal accurate results. This also goes for long standing systems where “tribal knowledge” may dictate using a set of measures that can’t be explained. Any time you spend validating your measurement data will pay off in spades.

1. Not measuring at all. It may seem wild in this technology driven world that some manage their projects straight from the hip – but some (lots of “some”) do. Strict guesswork on schedule and task completion is the calling card of this deadly sin. The question, “How do you know you’re on track” can’t be accurately answered. It’s not too late to start – it never is. But failing to measure your project’s results is the riskiest deadly sin of all.

Measuring project results isn’t hard but it does have to be deliberately executed. Your diligence and dedication to measure your project’s performance will pay off in more consistent, reliable and repeatable results, not to mention a better outcome for your customer.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 29th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Measurement, PM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.