Ever hear the adage “you get what you measure?” If that’s the case, what SHOULD you measure when it comes to your projects? Seize control of your project by using these two project metrics:
- Days (or %) of project completed, since the last update.
- Days (or %) lost (or gained) due to uncertainty (surprises).
Here’s why: One of Steven Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to “begin with the end in mind.” In managing a project, the end objective is to “complete the project.” Therefore, your primary measurement should be the progress made towards completing the project since the last update.
The metric for this is number of days of work we can credit towards completion (which can also be depicted as a %). When a week goes by, did you make five days worth of progress? More? Less? Your project system should tell you how much closer did the team get to project completion.
While that metric is a great start, it’s not sufficient. By nature, projects do not go exactly as planned. They are chock full of uncertainty — nasty surprises that will set the team back. To overcome this uncertainty, you need to measure it with a secondary fundamental measurement. When surprises happen, how much did they cost the project. How many days were lost (or sometimes gained)?!
For reporting, these two metrics are charted for each project update. The outcome is a brilliant and easy-to-understand metric called a buffer or fever chart. Each datapoint objectively answers an all-important question: “did we just have a good week?”
Many buffer charts are super-imposed over a red-yellow-green background (as in the above). That’s sort of a “buffer chart for Dummies” approach because we can tell a good week from bad simply by the line itself. In the above chart, the first three updates reveal a troubling pattern. They show a warning trend where we are losing more time each week due to surprises than time making progress towards completion. The fourth week was a spectacular week, regaining some of the lost “buffer” time and making great completion progress (about 7% buffer gained and 14% completion).
Whether the results are good or bad, this technique is key to controlling your projects — rather than having them control you.
