In every well-run project, the project management team needs to have a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they can use to monitor project progress and make informed decisions. The specific KPIs chosen depend on personal preference and project goals. This blog isn't focused on which KPIs to use, but rather emphasizes the importance of identifying the right KPIs and ensuring the project is set up to collect the necessary data from the outset.
Proactive KPI Planning
To ensure project success, it's essential to define and agree upon KPIs at the beginning of a major project. While numerous articles discuss various metrics and their pros and cons, most projects benefit from tracking a few fundamental metrics related to schedule adherence, financial controls, and safety. These metrics are crucial for monitoring overall project health.
However, in many projects, KPIs for the C&Q phase are often overlooked until the phase is well underway. This delay can lead to management seeking KPIs 20% into the C&Q phase, resulting in last-minute efforts to produce incomplete or manipulated data that can distract from the project's progress.
To avoid this, project management should proactively establish relevant KPIs for the C&Q phase from the start, ensuring accurate data collection and meaningful insights throughout the project.
Early Planning for Seamless C&Q Monitoring and Reporting
To ensure effective project management, it's crucial to determine how the project, especially the C&Q phase, will be monitored and reported from the start. By selecting appropriate KPIs early on and integrating data collection into project controls, you can avoid common pitfalls. Although this seems straightforward, it is rarely done, leading to difficulties in accessing and producing the needed data later. Proactively planning your KPIs can prevent these issues and ensure smooth project execution.
Proactive KPI Planning: A Guide for Conscientious Project Managers
How does the conscientious PM prevent this conundrum of exclusion of C&Q phase in project planning?
To avoid common KPI challenges, conscientious project managers should follow these guidelines:
1. First, look within your own organization to see if any KPIs are mandatory for project reporting. It is always awkward when you get a phone call seeking data
that the project should have for a KPI that corporate expects and have the needed data to generate the report.
1. Check Organizational Requirements: Start by identifying any mandatory KPIs within your organization. Ensure you have the necessary data to generate these reports to avoid any last-minute scrambles.
2. Engage with the Management Team: Discuss with your project’s management team the KPIs they have used in the past and understand their effectiveness.
3. Select Relevant KPIs: Based on these discussions, choose KPIs that are meaningful for your team and suitable for your specific project.
By planning and managing KPI development from the beginning, you can ensure smooth project monitoring and reporting throughout the project lifecycle.
Next, discuss with the project’s management team what other KPIs they have used and if and why they may have found them effective. From this discussion, select the ones that are meaningful for your team and appropriate for your project.
Clear KPI Definitions for Consistent Tracking
Once you have selected the KPIs to be used, the next step is to determine the details behind each one. This means each KPI should be looked at in detail, and discussions should be held to determine what data will be used to determine the KPI. For each KPI, while the expectation from the PM team may be clear, exactly how the calculation will be performed is critical to getting the desired data. I have spent many hours determining why a KPI indicates something different than what is being reported or what my intuition tells me is correct. In almost every case, there are subtle things in how items are counted and/or status-ed that can cause KPIs to become meaningless.In context, I have seen many times where a well-meaning member of the project control team performs analysis on a set of data, but the data is not being updated as they think, or it doesn’t mean what they think it means. On a recent project, we used a simple KPI to track the number of open issues in three categories:
1. Items to be corrected before the next engineering run
2. Items to be corrected before the planned conformance runs
3. Items to be corrected eventually
Initially, it seemed logical to expect an increase in all three categories as testing identified issues, followed by a decrease as issues were resolved at each milestone. However, what management thought was a straightforward process was interpreted differently by three different teams.
For instance:
· When was an item considered "corrected"? Was it when the code was changed or when a complete retest was conducted, which might take several weeks?
· If a fix was implemented as a troubleshooting step, should it be counted as resolved?
These subtle differences led to wildly varying graphs being presented to management from the different teams. To avoid such discrepancies, it's essential to have clear and consistent definitions of KPIs from the outset, ensuring all teams are aligned in their interpretation and reporting.
Ensuring Data Integrity and Efficiency from Project Inception
To ensure effective KPI implementation, each metric must undergo thorough definition and detailed calculation guidance. Moreover, it's crucial to establish systems early in the project lifecycle to efficiently capture required data. For instance, halfway through a C&Q project, understanding the expenditure on Utilities compared to budgeted amounts is vital. However, without a structured mechanism to allocate and capture these costs, such data may not exist when needed. It's imperative to specify data collection requirements to vendors at the project's outset to prevent frustration later. Ideally, these specifications should be detailed in project contracts to ensure comprehensive data capture aligns with project goals from the start.
Louis Traglia is a Bothwell Engineering Inc. Consultant/Project Manager with over 40 years of Engineering management expertise providing top notch service delivering projects, compliantly, on time and optimizing processes along the way.
Explore our services.
Let's connect on your next life science project.
