Define Metrics

2.7P Define Metrics

Medium Projects (2.7P.P1)

Project managers on medium projects should collect any information that is required across the organization - the same as small projects. Depending on the organization, there may be more information required for projects of this size. The project manager should also review the process for defining metrics on large projects. As a medium project gets closer to the size of a large project, there is more and more value associated with formally collecting and leveraging metrics. They may not get as sophisticated as those on a larger project, but there may be additional metric information that would be of value.

Large Projects

Creating the Project Scorecard (2.7P.P2)

Large projects should definitely be capturing metrics. There are two reasons for collecting the metrics – improving the project internal processes and declaring success on the project.

This following process will result in the creation of a Project Scorecard, which is used to determine how successful the project was. The scorecard should include the metrics necessary to validate you have met the quality expectations of the customer since this should be one of the aspects of validating project success.

	Role	Managing Metrics (Large Projects) Creating the Project Scorecard
1	Project Manager	Identify criteria for success Review the objectives and deliverables in the Project Charter, as well as any other existing information that is relevant to the project. Based on this existing documentation, define the criteria that will show that the project was successful. This can be from two perspectives: Internal. These characteristics indicate that the project was managed and executed effectively and efficiently. These types of metrics include having deliverables approved quickly, hitting major internal milestone dates on time and having a minimum number of errors uncovered. External. These characteristics indicate that your project objectives and deliverables were completed successfully. Examples of externally-focused metrics include completing the project within approved budget and timeline, ensuring your deliverables meet approved quality criteria and validating that the deliverables meet client expectations. If your organization is trying to be compliant with the Capability Maturity Model (CMMI), you should definitely include the business value delivered by the project as one of the key aspects of project success.
2	Project Manager	Assign potential metrics Identify potential metrics for each success criterion that provide an indication of whether you are on-track for success. These can be direct, quantifiable metrics or indirect metrics that give a sense for success criteria. For each metric, briefly determine how you would collect the information, the effort and cost of collection, and the value that would be obtained from the metric.
3	Project Manager	Look for a balance The potential list of metrics should be placed into categories to make sure that they provide a balanced view of the project. For instance, you do not want to end up with only a set of financial metrics, even though they might be easiest to obtain. In general, look for metrics that provide information in the areas such as: Cost Effort Duration Productivity Quality of deliverables Client satisfaction with the deliverables produced Project team performance Business value delivered A table of sample metrics can be viewed at 2.7.1T Sample Metrics.
4	Project Manager	Prioritize the balanced list of metrics Depending on how many metrics you have identified, prioritize the list to include only those that have the least cost to collect and provide the most value to the project. There can certainly be as many metrics collected as make sense for the project, but there may end up being no more than one or two per category. In general, look to provide the most information with the least amount of work. You should try to identify five to eight balanced metrics that will show the overall success of the project.
5	Project Manager	Set targets The raw metric may be of some interest, but the measure of success comes from comparing your actuals against a predefined target. The target provides the context to know if the current measurement value is good, bad or moving in the right direction. The target may be a single value you are trying to achieve or it may be a range. For instance, you may need to complete your project by a certain fixed date, but your actual cost might need to be ± 10% of approved budget.
6	Project Manager	Add schedule detail For each metric that remains, determine the specific activities necessary to collect and analyze the information. These activities are then added to the project schedule. This information needs to include: What specific data is needed for the metrics? Who is responsible for collecting the metric? When will the metric be collected and reported? How will the metrics be reported (status reports, quarterly meetings, metrics reports)?

Improving Internal Project Processes

Beginning of Project (2.7P.P3)

The following process is used to improve the project internal work processes.

	Role	Managing Metrics (Large Projects) Improving Internal Work Processes
1	Project Manager	Identify the major work processes You first need to identify major project work processes. This could include review and approval processes, the processes to create deliverables, testing processes, etc. It may not make sense to identify processes that are only executed once, since you will not be able to improve the process if it is never executed again. You also don’t want to worry about trivial processes unless they are repeated often. Again, you are trying to determine processes where you will receive some significant improvement in cost, schedule or effort hours.
2	Project Manager	Assign potential metrics Identify potential metrics for each internal process that provide an indication of how efficient the process is. These can be direct, quantifiable metrics or indirect metrics that give a sense for how the underlying process is progressing. You should also determine how you would collect the information, the effort and cost of collection, and the value that would be obtained from the metric.
3	Project Manager	Prioritize the balanced list of metrics Depending on how many metrics you have identified, prioritize the list to include only those that have the least cost to collect and provide the most value to the project.
4	Project Manager	Set targets The raw metric may be of some interest, but the measure of success comes from comparing your actuals against a predefined target. The target provides the context to know if the current measurement value is good, bad or moving in the right direction. The target may be a single value you are trying to achieve or it may be a range. It is very likely that you do not have any pre-defined targets for many of these metrics. If that is the case, you may need to collect the data early in the project to use as a baseline. After you collect the first set of metrics, your target will be to improve these metric by some percentage.
5	Project Manager	Add schedule detail For each metric that remains, determine the specific activities necessary to collect and analyze the information. These activities are then added to the project schedule. This information needs to include: What specific data is needed for the metrics? Who is responsible for collecting the metric? When will the metric be collected and reported? How will the metrics be reported (status reports, quarterly meetings, metrics reports)?