Once a project gets started, people start wondering if things are going well or not. What does “going well” mean and how can you tell? You could use a gut feel that things are OK or things are NOT OK. That might work in small startups or experimental pilot projects. It’s also an easy way to fool yourself. Startups sometimes find they’ve spent their funding before they’ve reached a level of self-sustaining business. In general, successful project managers avoid fooling themselves; that’s what makes them successful. So they want some way to verify that the rate of progress is sufficient.
First you need to figure out how to detect and measure progress. We’ll look at several approaches before settling on one that seems to work well enough, most of the time. We’ll visualize that progress, so you can perhaps spot things that look “a little funny” and not take all the numbers at face value. Your measurement of progress is, itself, an estimate and subject to error.
We’ll also consider that you’ll likely need to show this progress to others, in ways that make sense to them. The people with fiduciary responsibility for a project have a need to compare the costs with expected value.
It’s hard to talk about the progress of a project without someone getting anxious about how fast or slow it’s going. Perhaps that person is you. Perhaps you need to talk with that person. In either case, we’ll look at how too much focus on speed can sabotage the goals of the project, and even its rate of progress. I’m not suggesting that you ignore the speed of progress, but we’ll look at balancing that with other concerns.
Of course, if the project is small enough and you don’t have to communicate with other people, you might get by with using your gut feel for progress. You might…if you don’t fool yourself.
Casual Sense of Progress
You may remember I had estimated how long it might take me to get to the train station by comparison with other trips (in Everyday Estimation—Another Take). This trip, though, is a little more complicated.
I’ve got a lot of little errands I need to run. And I should get some lunch before catching the train. I wonder how many things I can get done this morning. Let me make a list of what I might accomplish.
I’d better move these things to the top of the list, as they’re the most important or most urgent. And I’ll reorder some things because of geography. I want to clump errands in the same part of town and I want to end the list with the café near the train station. That way I can get lunch before catching the train.
I’m a quarter of the way through my list in a quarter of the time I have available. Things are looking pretty good. I’m glad of that, because I don’t want to miss my train.
A gut feel won’t be reassuring enough in most situations encountered in organizations of size. Executives of larger organizations have a fiduciary responsibility to spend money wisely. They may not be able to define what “wisely” means, but they need to show evidence to those with oversight of getting value for the cost.
When satisfied that things are going well, people turn to improvement. “Couldn’t thing be going a little better? We want the optimum progress!” This is understandable, but you can get into some dangerous territory. If you’re not careful, you can harm your progress in your attempts to optimize.
