If you have a project team room, war room or command center, you likely have an abundance of metrics hanging on the wall, ranging from resource allocation, schedule variance and cost variance, to milestone counts, Gantt charts and individual progress reports. You spend a lot of time gathering data and generating metrics for the project team room; however, how often do you share them with the rest of the organization?
Promoting project metrics is one way to generate awareness about your project, support organizational change management, keep the larger organization informed, and ideally help reduce the number of interruptions to your daily schedule. Project promotion doesn’t require a lot of effort except a few tacks and few pages of the weekly project metrics posted outside the team room or the sponsor’s office.
Promoting project progress is critical to major programs and projects impacting the organization. During a recent program that implemented new human resource services across the company, the program team promoted project metrics by posting deliverables, status, scope and metric information in the main hallway for anyone to review. Project stakeholders, business customers and ancillary staff frequently asked questions about the scope, timing and progress of the program. By posting project metrics on the outside team room wall, a lot of questions were answered simply by walking past the team room wall and reviewing the program metrics. The metric promotion was so successful that PMO staff would consult the project wall to answer their high level questions instead of pursuing the project manager.
The Wall of Metrics
The specific metrics posted to the project wall are project specific and can be augmented to provide more background information as needed. The key is to promote meaningful project information to keep stakeholders informed using the same project reporting produced during project execution. The following examples are just a few ideas for a project metric wall:
Posting | Purpose |
Days to Launch | Useful metric to remind the project team and casual observers about the number of days left before delivery. |
Scope Summary | |
Critical Success Factors | Identify the critical success factors for the project and update each CSF with a green, yellow, red status. It is a useful technique to track the key performance of CSFs in the project. |
Gantt Chart and Timeline | Lists all the major work streams and milestones within a project or program with related dependencies |
Work stream Status | List all the major work streams in the program and include a slide with summary level status and progress indicators |
Individual Project Status Reports | Post a one-page project report summarizing the overall project or program’s progress. |
Key Deliverable Metrics | Share the count of planned deliverables vs. actual deliverables to date. |
These metrics are provided as thought starters. Depending on the sensitivity of the project, additional project metrics may include percentage of budget, time and scope completed. Quality management metrics, budget performance, outstanding issues, risk management aging, change requests and client satisfaction metrics can be added as the project progresses across the project lifecycle.
Impact to Prospective Clients
Few multi-million dollar contracts are executed without due diligence, reviewing existing customer feedback and site visits. Metrics promotion can have a significant impact on the prospective client. During the HR services evaluation, the company visited two clients from prospective vendors. One vendor provided an excellent tour of the facility and spoke about project metrics. Another vendor provided a tour accompanied by performance metrics posted at every station. These metrics had not been assembled for the prospective customer; instead, they were used to manage day-to-day delivery. The metric producing vendor gained greater credibility with the assessment team because they openly shared their performance and managed to them rather than providing lip service.
Promoting project metrics creates a buzz around the project and helps keep everyone informed. If you’re managing your project with metrics, publishing these metrics outside the team room shouldn’t require any extraordinary effort. Metrics promotion is contagious, and soon you’ll find the project sponsor and other key stakeholders will take the same metrics and share them with their organizations.
In the HR program, the business customer only posted one key metric outside the office door — the number of days left before the project launch. Despite all the other metrics, it summarized the one key metric that the business customer truly valued — delivery to the date promised.
