By Jason Ames, PMP

Continuing our discussion from the previous blog article, we are ready to address success factor 3 in the Key Drivers to EPPM Success.

Measuring What’s Important

Team members will work against what they are measured against, so it is essential to ensure that you are measuring the right things and that management is encouraging the right actions. For example, it does not make sense for a team to spend lots of money on overtime when the cost is critical. Former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden used to say “Don’t mistake activity for achievement.”

When a program starts, it is essential to establish the measurement criteria. If your project has a fixed budget, you should target cost controls and allow your schedule to slip if necessary. If you have fixed deliverable milestones, you do everything possible to complete them on time. Too often, organizations measure non-value-added metrics.

What should be done to ensure this does not happen?

1. Determine up front what is most important on the project: cost, schedule, resource utilization? Once this is determined, what you track becomes significantly easier to identify.

2. Do not get too caught up in activity start and completion dates. Remember that these durations are estimates for most projects and should be treated as such. Too much focus on individual activities will cause functional managers to pad their estimates to avoid negative reviews. It may also increase the costs of your project if a functional team is burning hours to hit these start and stop dates. Instead of focusing on late start and late finish, concentrate on the program’s critical path and near-critical paths.

3. Once the measurement criteria have been established, there must be a regular review of the measurement criteria with functional groups and the project’s management and executive sponsors. Team members should be able to clearly see how the project is progressing and determine if corrective action is needed.