Stelios Pantazopoulos delivered a nice presentation on useful metrics for project health. Because of the health idea, his metaphor was a patient in a hospital and the graphs and metrics were the output of the machines. It worked really well, but it almost seems to have the starting idea that your project is in the hospital. While not as grounded in science, I think a better idea would be to use some sort of holistic, preventative medicine one. The same things can be tracked, but the perspective and positioning changes completely.

  • Has a chapter on the subject in The Thoughtworks Anthology
  • Metrics need to show how and why a project is on track
  • What you want is simple, quantitative, near real-time metrics
  • PMBOK (apparently) has 4 ‘levers’ which affect a project. I of course didn’t write them down…
  • He adds a 5th: Team
  • The goal of vital sign checks is to bring visibility to all 5 levers
  • The Vital Signs
    • Scope Build Up
    • Current State of Delivery
    • Budget Burn Down
    • Delivery Quality
    • Team Dynamics
  • Make all these public! The last place you want stats like this is buried in a status report. Transparency builds shared team responsibility and trust
  • These metrics (once the framework is in place) should only take 2 – 3 hours per week

Edit: The PMBOK levers are: Budget, Scope, Schedule, Quality. Thanks to Michael Glenn who apparently took better notes than me.