“A useful metric is both accurate (in that it measures what it says it measures) and aligned with your goals. Making your numbers go up (any numbers–your bmi, your blood sugar, your customer service ratings) is pointless if the numbers aren’t related to why you went to work this morning.” – Seth Godin 

Reporting on cost, schedule, scope, effort, quality etc is pointless unless they directly relate to the business case. This is why it is important to outline and review what metrics you will be using to report the status of the project. Don’t assume the triple constraint(scope, time & cost) is a relevant or an accurate way of presenting a project’s status.

Review how you will be measuring the success of the project or a stage and then come up with some qualitative or quantitative metrics against those measures.

To me, the best thing about being a PM is being entrepreneurial. Every time we run a project, we are starting up a temporary business until it fulfills its objectives. Just like startups we are implementing a significant change to a market, we are disruptive and attractive.

There are a lot of similarities between a project and a start-up:

We start out with an idea for change, create a proposal, then build a business case then we seek funding, hire staff, build whatever it is we’re building or do what we’re doing and eventually we exit via our exit strategy. We have shareholders and investors, plans and budgets. We have the same organization and reporting structure like a lean efficient board and board reports. We run into the same issues, like funding, costs, time to market, finding good staff and customer expectations etc.

Project’s and start-ups share the same success factors, we need a solid business case,  we’re generally taking calculated risks to deliver the changes,  we must understand who were are targeting(our stakeholders) and a huge time/effort investment is usually required. As Seth Godin said “Just about every great new project couples a brilliant strategy with impossible logistics that somehow get handled.”

Project Management isn’t a cookie cutter industry full of schedules, plans, controls and other engineering terms. It has those to help but really it’s an exciting world full of creativity and change. As PM’s, every time we start a new project, we start a new business, to deliver a change to our customers.  We can learn a lot from the world of start-ups, why they fail or succeed and apply it to our projects if we can just let go of our PMBOK’s for a minute.

The problem with most project schedules is that they focus on time. Yeah they show activities and of course resources but it’s mostly about time. And that is somewhat acceptable if time is the number one constraint but rarely it is, usually the benefits and quality or cost is close to that.

We’re so used to seeing dates and times and receiving questions like: when can this be done? When will you do this by? When will I realize my benefits? We forget that time is a constant and cannot be changed and therefore planning to time is focusing your efforts on something that you can do nothing about. This I believe to be the single largest factor for why project’s are considered failures.

So instead, I strongly suggest hiding all date related information from your plans when building them. This will help focus your plans on controllable variables such as products (deliverable), resources, effort, costs, risk etc.

Never has, never will because time is a constant, you cannot make more time or less time.Effort = money. You can measure effort by time, poorly in my opinion but it suits old time based business models where employee’s are paid for time. You can also measure effort by quality and quantity.

Some products require more effort, some are easily repeatable and are therefore individually less valuable.

Because you choose to base my effort based upon my ability to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week and not on deliverable produced does not mean that your free time is more important than mine. So when you leave it until 5pm on a Friday and “need” me to work the weekend, consider what you are asking because “free time” in your old model is worth infinitely more to me then “work time”.

Time does not equal effort. Effort does equal time but the formula is far more complicated than that.  This is a simpleton’s way of explaining the old way of looking at work and why it needs to change.