Should Requirement Quality be Measured?

Measuring requirement quality can reveal opportunities for long-term improvements in requirement definition, can show you where to invest for improvements, and can help you develop your team.

Opportunities for improvement

If requirement quality isn’t measured, there will be no future improvement in requirements. Every project – in terms of requirements quality – will be a rerun of the last project. No lessons learned. No forward progression.

Did your last project have rework? Were there any crisis situations in testing? Were there customer complaints? A review of the last project’s requirements may show you how to avoid some of those same headaches on your current and future projects. Read more »

Doing the Right Things for Your Customer

Customers are a demanding group … that’s a given. When we have all of our regular project responsibilities to deal with on a daily and weekly basis, how do we know when we’re doing the right things for our customers? How do we know we’re managing them well, responding to the right requests, saying ‘yes’ when we should and saying ‘no’ when we should, and ensuring that our actions are not detrimental to the forward progress of our project?

You can’t always base it on customer satisfaction levels. Because attentive ‘do-anything-for-the-customer’ behavior may get a project manager and team high marks mid-way through a project. But upon implementation, if they’ve said yes to too many things that ended up modifying scope and delivering a system to the customer that is ultimately not what they ordered, then that customer satisfaction at the end of the project will be low. The end user community will have a product that they didn’t sign up for and that’s a very bad thing.

In order to ensure we’re doing right by our customers, we first need to have confidence in what we’re doing. And we need to have confidence that we’re doing the right things for the project. We can do that in a few ways, including:

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Five Indicators that Your Project May be in Trouble

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

The world of project management is not always black and white. Sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad. Actually, there are some things that are cut and dried….

• You’re project budget is either green or red
• A milestone is either met or it isn’t
• A customer either accepts a deliverable or they don’t
• You either get to keep your job at the end of the engagement or you don’t

However, so many things in the PM world are not that clear. And you have to learn to look for the subtleties at times to gauge certain things about your project, your customer’s satisfaction level, your team’s focus, etc. New project managers won’t be there yet. Experienced project managers learn – over time – to look for certain indicators that will help tell them how things are going, how the project is being perceived, and if there are some corrective or evasive actions they may need to be taking.

Here are some signs I’ve observed in the course of my career in project management that usually will raise a red flag:

• Executive management has a sudden interest in your project. This one could be good or bad – but it’s usually bad. The project may have taken on a higher level of visibility within the organization due to many reasons or factors. However, it’s also very likely that your customer is troubled by something and has contacted someone higher up resulting in this new interest. This indicates both that your customer has a concern and that they went around you as the PM and discussed it with executive management without your knowledge. Not a good sign.
• New staff has been added to your project without you requesting them. When management starts to add staff to your project – look out. They are likely putting someone senior on the project to baby-sit it and the PM. I’ve seen it happen to project managers on projects. Somehow, along the way, confidence in the PM has diminished. It may be because of something the customer said or because of activities that have been observed, but it’s not usually a good sign. Requests for resources should always come from the project manager.
• Your PMO director has started dialing in to your customer status calls. A sudden interest in your project from the PMO director when they were hands-off before may be a bad indicator. Again, it may mean the customer has gone around the PM and complained about something, but for whatever reason the PMO director is indirectly expressing concern about the project status.
• Accounting is asking you about unpaid customer invoices related to your project. This one is bad because it means that, for whatever reason, your customer has become slow in paying their bills. It’s up to the project manager to engage the customer in a discussion about the outstanding invoices and possible discuss overall satisfaction. Only two things will slow a customer down in paying their bills and both are bad – customer cash flow issues and customer satisfaction issues.
• The customer has been less communicative / more distant. If the customer has been less involved, less communicative, slower in making decisions or you’re just sensing a lack of commitment to the project on the part of the customer, it may be a bad sign. What it can mean is that the project has lost priority on the customer side. Or that it has lost funding. Or that the customer team is about to be re-assigned elsewhere. No matter what the cause, it’s not a good sign because it may mean the project is going to be slowed way down or that it is going to be canceled completely. It’s a good sign that you should contact the customer project team lead and have a serious discussion about the project direction and customer commitment to finishing the project.

Estimating Project Effort and Cost

The post is made possible by the great people at Seavus, creators of online Project Management tools such as ProjectOffice.net, Project Viewer, and Project Planner.  Please visit their site for more information.

This article is based on information from “The Project Management Question and Answer Book,” by Michael Newell and Marina Grashina.

As part of your project management responsibilities, estimating the effort and cost on the project is going to be something you’ll have to do from time to time. Sometimes that will all be decided up front by sales and the customer and there won’t be much you can do about it. However, there will be times…hopefully…where you’ll get some solid input to the estimation process – especially on change orders.

In order to run the project you first need to know how long things take, how much they will cost, and what kind of resources will be required. The only way you can get this data is by doing good estimates. Without good estimates you really have no way of knowing where you are at any point in the project, and you have no way of predicting how much the project will cost or how long it is going to take to do it.

A project estimate is the determination of the effort it will take to achieve a desired result. There are two major things that we estimate in a project; one is the cost of the project or the money that will have to be spent to produce it. The second is the time that the project will take to be completed. Whenever we are doing project estimates, we will not only be estimating the cost of doing the work but also the time that it will take to complete it.

No one said project management is easy – and likewise there are many pitfalls in producing a good estimate for a project. The deliverables may not all be identified, key project supports change their minds, project team members may be optimistic or pessimistic, time may be limited, and so forth. If the project is poorly defined, there is not much of a possibility that the cost and schedule estimates are going to come out anywhere near what the actual cost and schedule time for the project will be.

Project management is about realistic expectations. Therefore, overly optimistic schedules can cause problems in estimating as well. Stakeholders or management frequently shorten schedules without adding budget to the project. Generally we can look for increases in cost when schedules are shortened. An inaccurate work breakdown structure causes work tasks to be missed. When the individual estimates for the tasks are added up to make a bottom-up estimate for the project, missed work tasks cause underestimation which can severely affect the budget. Understating risks underestimates our cost and schedule estimates as well. Risks that are not identified and identified risks that have the wrong value for their estimated probability or impact cause management reserves and contingency budgets to be misstated. Cost inflation and failure to include appropriate overheads cause erroneous estimates. It is important to recognize wage and price increases that will occur during the project and adjust estimates accordingly.

Summary

Project estimation is a skill that comes from experience. However, even the most inexperienced project manager can produce good estimates. Look to your skilled team resources and management to assist and make estimates with confidence. And don’t be afraid to adjust estimates as your project moves along and you gain more knowledge – your project budget will be healthier for it.

Earned Value Reporting – To Complete Cost Performance Index

In this article on Earned Value Reporting we’ll examine the To Complete Cost Performance Index. In a nutshell, the To Complete Cost Performance Index tells us the cost performance that is required to complete a given project for it’s original budget based on how it is performing right now.

The book “The Project Management Question and Answer Book” by Michael Newell and Marina Grashina is the source for much of this overview.

What is the to complete cost performance index?

The to complete cost performance index, TCCPI, tells us the required cost performance that is necessary to complete the project for the original budget based on the performance of the project as of today.

The to complete cost performance index is a seldom-used indicator, and there are some difficulties in its use. The TCCPI is calculated by dividing the work remaining by the money remaining in the budget to do it. The remaining work in a project is simply the difference between the work already accomplished, the BCWP, and the total work of the project, the BAC. You will recall that when the project is completed, the BCWP must exactly equal the BAC. Mathematically it is impossible for this not to happen since the BAC is equal to the sum of the BCWP and is also equal to the sum of the BCWS. The remaining budget for the project is simply the difference between the total budget for the project, again the BAC, and the amount of money that has been spent to date, the ACWP.

TCCPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – ACWP)

It can be seen that as a project’s cost performance index moves below one, the TCCPI will increase and become greater than 1. Although called an “index”, this is not really accurate since all indexes indicate something bad when they fall below one and this index indicates something bad when it is greater than one.

The TCCPI gives us a rough estimate of the performance that is required for the remaining portion of the project in order for the project to be completed for the original budget. A TCCPI of 1.33 indicates that the project team must perform with a CPI of 1.33 from now until the project is completed in order for the project to be completed at the original budget.

There is a mathematical difficulty with this term as well. If a project is over budget toward the end of the project, it is possible for the BAC and the ACWP to be equal. This produces a division by zero and a point of discontinuity.

Under normal conditions it results in a value that indicates the required performance that the project must have from now until the end of the project.

Example:

Suppose a project is somewhere near 50 percent complete:

BCWS = $100,000

BCWP = $95,000

ACWP = $97,000

BAC = $200,000

CV = BCWP – ACWP

CV = -$2,000

What is the TCCPI?

TCCPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – ACWP)

TCCPI = (200,000 – 95,000) / (200,000 – 97,000)

TCCPI = 1.02

In this example the project would be required to do all of the remaining work at a 2 percent higher cost performance than was originally planned. This may be particularly difficult since the cost performance index to date is only 98 percent. We will be asking the project team to improve their cost performance by some 4 percent.

Notice that if the cost variance remains the same as the end of the project approaches, the TCCPI increases rapidly. Suppose we have the following when the project is approximately 95 percent complete:

BCWS = $195,000

BCWP = $190,000

ACWP = $192,000

BAC = $200,000

CV = BCWP – ACWP

CV = -$2,000

What is the TCCPI?

TCCPI = (BAC – BCWP) / (BAC – ACWP)

TCCPI = (200,000 – 190,000) / (200,000 – 192,000)

TCCPI = 1..25

As we approach the end of the project, the cost variance has not changed, but the TCCPI has changed from 1.02 to 1.25. This is an indicator that the cost variance will be much more difficult to recover now than it was earlier in the project.