Resources

Presentation - Measuring for Success

A practical look at Measurement & Analysis from an organizational perspective. What templates tools,and advice are you going to give to your software development teams to help them derive real project improvements by using Measurement and Analysis?

Smart teams learn from the work they do so they can do it better, faster, cheaper next time.  Emotional “gut-feeling” evaluations on past performance are often inaccurate, biased by inaccurate data or the specific perceptions of a few people.

To properly manage a project, objective and accurate measurement-based data is needed.  What actually went well? What not so well?  What systemic changes can I make to improve things and deliver more “product” more quickly next time?

The old management adage is true, “You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure”.
That said, in the pressurised environment of a modern project, any effort spent on measuring performance is at the opportunity cost of not spending that time on delivering, right? – (That is almost certainly how measurement will be perceived at first!)  It is imperative therefore to ensure that any project Measurement regime helps the project perform better and does not simply become another overhead with no tangible positive benefit. The whole team needs to “buy-in”.

Benefit:  Delegates will learn how to setup a measurement regime that:

• is easy to instantiate,
• promotes re-use of measure definitions over multiple projects,
• scales and can be applied to any level of organisational hierarchy and
• complies with the rigour expected at Maturity Level 2 and beyond.

The measurement approach discussed has been designed fundamentally to help the organisation stay true to some key measurement principles.  Remember, if you get bogged-down in the work of creating a measurement plan, or feel somehow that your measures are pointless, come back to this brief list of principles…..is a change in direction needed?

•  There must be a reason why you are measuring things; make sure your measurements are goal based! – If you don’t know why you are capturing measures, what you are trying to achieve by collecting the figures, it is likely that your time doing so will be wasted.
• Measuring is a waste of time – if you don’t make use of the information you find out!  If you are not going to base project management decisions on the measurement data you collect, there is little point in collecting it.
• Don’t go mad! - Collecting many measures is time consuming, not only in collecting the figures, but defining what the metric is all about.  It is better to have a few key measures that are properly founded with goals and that are properly followed, analysed and fed back, than many half-hearted measures.

Based on the Goal-Question-Metric approach and 2+ years hard work at a large UK Government organisation, this practical, experienced-based presentation shows project managers how to quickly and easily set-up an effective measurement regime that not only helps you to improve the teams productivity, but will help you scale the process maturity heights of CMMI.

When you are trying to effect process improvement in large organisations with literally hundreds of concurrently running projects of all types and levels of organisational abstraction, setting a Measurement Policy that scales, meets the maturity traits set out in the model, but is also easy to stand-up and apply is a tricky business.

This presentation exposes a plan and measure definition template set and ideas for an organisational catalogue of standard measures that will help solve the commonly faced measurement and analysis conundrums.

This presentation builds and improves upon a similar presentation made to the European SEPG Amsterdam in June 2007.