Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Project Measurements - First Pilot

Yeah!!!.. The first pilot of the new Project Performance Index went exceedingly well today. The project group consisted of 7 team members (plus me = 8). I consider this an optimal size to get a fair cross section of opinions. The team was asked to rate the three performance categories across the range of "Great", "Good", "Caution" and "At Risk". These rating scales are used elsewhere in other project status reporting tools so they were a natural fit to use here.

Before asking the group to rate each I framed up the context within the three categories. This gave them a common understanding of what was to be considered, and hopefully educated them about what is considered important.

Initially I was surprised at the results. The team rated both Business Performance and Project Performance as Caution to Caution - At Risk. And to their credibility, these brutally honest results were shared among the group. However at second thought, I now consider these results as to be expected. The rationale behind this is that the project team has only been together for one month now, and would be feeling somewhat disjointed and unsure about the project.

The real test as to whether doing this measurement was time worth spending is if anyone saw value in it. Fortunately this did occur, and I suspect because not only did we surface some undisclosed concerns, but because we came up with actions to move the rating towards great.

The exercise also gave me further insight towards representative samples. In order to assess project performance across the corporation I need to survey projects at different times within their lifecycle.

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