Revisting project success criteria

We are nearing the end of the year. It is a great time to reflect what worked and what did not work. It is time to revise the goals, metrics to prepare for the future. In this context, I  would like to  share findings from  current research and few ideas on revising the project success criteria.

Many project managers have been trained on the idea of the iron traingle of project success, that is delivering the project scope within the agreed  time and cost budgets. We also understand that real project success as understood by the stake holders from the benefit provided to them, is much more than meeting the iron triangle. There have been several studies over the years in relating the project performance to project success. Pedro Serrador and Rodney Turner in their paper "The Relationship Between Project Success and Project Efficiency"  (paywalled) surveyed 1386 projects and concluded project efficiency(meaning the project scope, time and cost goals) correlates moderately strongly  to overall project success with a correlation of 0.6. So there is a need to consider  other project success factors and also monitor project success metric from the point of view of the various stakeholders.

Most organizations measure project metrics like quality, predictability, productivity and customer satisfaction on a monthly basis. They may also have an yearly survey with customers to get their satisfaction levels with past projects and identify potential future business. This may not be specifically mapped to the past projects and used for improvement.  The measure of satisfaction from team, customer/sponsor and organization preparedness for future at periodic intervals and relating them to the past projects can make the organizations better at managing  project portfolios. Trying to measure these could be difficult as the  what, when, who and how need to be defined.  Initially the measurement may not be complete. Once the measurement is started, the results may be useful at a higher hierarchy of the organization at first and overtime, the benefit may be felt at the various levels. So the best time is to start now.

If you  already have a better project success metric, I appreciate if you can  share your experience.

Happy holidays and new year...

Automated metrics from repositories for better project insight

Metrics are important to understand project health.  Every project manager has to present them for  review meetings. Traditionally spreadsheet software was used extensively for  metrics preparation. Project Manager has to do a lot of work to contact team members for status information and then update the  spreadsheets. The metrics are subjective and are delayed.  Most of these spreadsheets also will not be ideal for knowledge management in organization, as these are not archived and available for future reference.This situation has improved with  increased use of   non spreadsheet  tools in the recent times.

Usually tools used for requirements, coding, code review, testing  and change  management and project management,  have  built-in reports. These are useful for understanding the status and issues in a project in a timely manner. These may require customization to conform to the specifics of process followed by the organization.  If the tools are not integrated,  consolidation of metrics requires additional effort and possibly use of spreadsheets again with their inherent advantages and disadvantages. Software analytics is a good alternative when the tools are not integrated.

Open source communities are leveraging tools like MetricsGrimoire  (See sample figure above from Dashboard of Wikimedia Development Community) to mine repositories associated with  configuration management, bug tracking and mailing list for projects and extract useful metrics and present them visually for analysis and action. These metrics are useful  to identify  top contributors, aging of artifacts, velocity of development as well as provide insight into issues.

What is the level of  non spreadsheet tools usage in your organization? How much time is spent in generating the metrics? Is there an opportunity to deploy additional tools, deploy software analytics tools  and develop automation scripts to extract metrics? These are all valid questions which can lead to improved productivity and project success.