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298 Part IV: Controlling Your Software Project Determining realistic project milestones Consider the major events or accomplishments in your life; these are considered milestones. Some examples are Turning 21 Landing that first project management job Getting hitched Buying a car Earning a promotion You may have different milestones, but a project milestone list should consist of realistic, attainable milestones such as the following: Contract signed Project team in place Phase 1 development complete Unit testing complete Project acceptance sign-off Final payment received You re better off setting realistic project milestones that you can successfully meet than you are setting unrealistic project milestones and missing every deadline, overrunning your budget, and fighting scope creep every step of the way. Sometimes the organization or the client may impose unrealistic schedule milestones. Unrealistic deadlines are a great example of a project constraint something that limits you or your project team. But when you have the power to do so, create realistic project milestones. Work with your project team, other project managers who have completed similar projects, and other stakeholders to help you in setting realistic milestones. Don t be hesitant to use the resources available to you to assist you in setting realistic milestones. Implementing a Tracking Plan Hey, are your metrics working? How do you know? By implementing a tracking plan, of course. A tracking plan puts all the metrics you ve determined are important to work for you.
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Chapter 15: Tracking Project Performance 297 Planning for project metrics Here are some of the project metrics you might use with your quality management plan to determine whether you re meeting the quality goals defined in your quality management plan for your software project: Benchmarking: This process compares your current project activities to those performed in other similar projects. For example, you might compare the development phase of your project with the development project, similar in size and scale to yours, that s already complete. The benchmark for completing the development phase may be three months less than what you scheduled. Similarly, you might use a benchmark for comparing the number of errors found during the system testing phase of a project similar in scope to yours. If the other project found fewer errors than yours, you may have a problem. You can display benchmark information in a manner that makes sense for your project. It could be as simple as a bar chart with one bar displaying a ten-week testing phase for your project and another bar showing a seven-week testing phase for a similar size project. Pareto (pa-ray-toh) charts: These are histograms (or bar graphs) that display project issues and rank order of the causes of those problems. Control charts: Charts that show processes that are not reliable or stable. Project audits: Audits that are used to determine whether particular project processes conform to defined parameters. Procurement metrics: Metrics that are used to evaluate contractors and vendors. Earned value management: A tool that allows you to ascertain whether you re on schedule, within budget, and on track with your software project (see Chapter 14). Your organization may have other specific project metrics that you need to become familiar with. You have several options out there, and some may be better for a particular project than others. In general, we think it s helpful to be familiar with a broad range of project metrics so that you can determine what will work best in any given situation. The project metrics that help you succeed in the software project you re currently managing may not be the same project metrics that will work in your next software project. Be flexible and open to using a variety of project metrics that suit the needs of each individual project.
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296 Part IV: Controlling Your Software Project Planning Project Metrics Setting up metrics is Step 3 of a fool-proof, four-step plan: 1. Set your project goals. 2. Use your leadership capabilities, project management skills, influence, and problem-solving skills to meet those project goals. 3. Create project metrics to tell you whether you ve reached those project goals. 4. Use your communication management plan to disseminate that information to your project stakeholders. But what are metrics? Here s a quick-and-dirty definition: Your project metrics are the processes, tools, and techniques that you use to measure the progress of your software project. The reason measuring your project progress is so important is because metrics enable you to proactively recognize whether You re on track with your software project You re ahead of or behind schedule You re under- or overbudget You re performing to the quality standards defined by your organization Your project team members are performing to their maximum ability The potential risks you ve identified have materialized and could potentially adversely affect the project You need to intervene to bring the project back on track As you plan your software project metrics, keep in mind that you should be proactive; find problems before they find you. That s the point. Establishing project goals Before you establish the project goals for your software project, you should become familiar with the goals of the organization. A good software project plan supports and aligns with the strategic goals of the organization. After you define the project goals, all of the other project management processes should support those goals. For example, the quality management plan should support the quality goals of the software project and the product. Have you ever heard the expression, If you don t know where you want to go, then how will you know when you arrive? The same concept applies to setting project goals.
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Chapter 15 Tracking Project Performance In This Chapter Setting the proper project goals Keeping track of project performance Understanding the benefits and limitations of a PMIS Being a fine host for a project status meeting Communicating effectively with the appropriate stakeholders Communicating good and bad news Your project is underway and things appear to be going well, or so you think. How do you know how things are really working? Is your project on time, within budget, meeting not just your, but also your stakeholders , expectations? Unless you have a system for measuring and quantifying the performance of your project and all its components, you really don t know whether you re moving things in the right direction. To be sure that you can show that your project is progressing as planned, you must be able to not only measure the various items involved in getting the project to closure (see Chapter 14 for information on one kind of assessment, earned value management), but also to communicate to the appropriate stakeholders that things are going as anticipated. After all, if stakeholders aren t convinced, you may find yourself with a plan and no project to go with it. You might also find yourself at an employment agency trying to finagle a new software project management position. So how do you prove that everything is as it should be with your project? Well, that s why you re reading this chapter, isn t it?
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294 Part IV: Controlling Your Software Project Because your SPI is 0.8, your schedule is progressing at 80 percent of the rate that you planned. You guessed it! If your number is less than 1 for your CPI or your SPI, that s not a good sign. A number less than 1 indicates that your software project is either overbudget or behind schedule. If the value of your SPI is 1, that would mean that your schedule is going exactly as planned.
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Chapter 14: Using Earned Value Management in Software Projects 293 Whoop-dee-doo! What does this mean to a software project? Calculating PV, AC, and EV, along with vari-Similarly, if your SPI is 1, your schedule is 100 ances, enables you to determine whether your percent where it should be. So, if the SPI is project is on the right path. These calculations greater than 1, that s good. If your SPI is less help you to predict how your software project than 1, that s bad. For example, an SPI of 1.25 will progress based on where you are now. The indicates that the project is performing at a rate variances compare where you are with where of 125 percent, and if your SPI is .99, the project you expected to be. is performing at 99 percent of where you expected to be with regards to the schedule. Now that you know how to calculate all of these numbers, what does that mean? A CPI What does all this mean to your software proof 1 means that your project is costing you ject? These calculations are necessary to exactly what you planned for it to cost. So, determine if you are over- or underbudget and if logically, if the CPI is less than 1, you are spend-you are over or behind on your schedule. This ing more than you expected, and if your CPI is gives you the information you need to determine greater than 1, you are spending less than you if your variance is enough to make significant expected. For example, if your CPI is 1.25, you re changes such as increasing the number of pro- getting $1.25 for every dollar that you expected. grammers or revising timelines. If your CPI is .99, you re getting 99 cents for every dollar that you expected. If your CPI is 1, then your project is right where you expected it to be. If your CPI is greater than 1, your project is doing better than you expected; you re getting more than a dollar for every dollar that you expected to earn. If your CPI is less than 1, you are not getting as much as you expected on your project. In our example, you are earning less than $1.00 for every dollar you expected to earn. Still, 96 cents isn t too far from the mark. Calculating your Schedule Performance Index (SPI) SPI answers the question, Where are you in the schedule compared to where you expected to be at this point in time? To calculate your SPI, you divide EV by the PV. Here s an example, with some made-up numbers: SPI = EV PV EV = $24,000 PV = $30,000 EV PV = 0.8
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292 Part IV: Controlling Your Software Project You can probably guess that because you have a negative number for your VAC, the current numbers indicate that the project will cost more than you originally planned. A positive number for your VAC indicates that your project is going better than you expected. A value of 1 indicates that you re right on budget. Finding your cost and schedule performance indexes You can do several calculations to determine whether your software project is progressing as efficiently as you and your stakeholders expected. Use these performance indexes to trend your project s performance and predict how efficient your project will be for the duration. An index indicates how efficiently your project is progressing and may be used to predict your project s future performance. Table 14-4 summarizes the index formulas we describe in the following sections. Table 14-4 Index Formulas Index Formula Cost Performance Index (CPI) CPI = EV AC Schedule Performance Index (SPI) SPI EV PV Calculating your Cost Performance Index (CPI) Cost Performance Index (CPI) answers the question, How much are you getting for each dollar you are spending on your project? To determine CPI, divide the earned value by your actual cost: CPI = EV AC. For example, if your earned value is $24,000 and your actual cost is $25,000, finding your CPI looks like this: CPI = EV AC EV = $24,000 AC = $25,000 EV AC = 0.96 Okay, now that you have your CPI, what does it mean? It means that you re getting $0.96 for each $1.00 that you expected to earn.
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Chapter 14: Using Earned Value Management in Software Projects 291 from your plan. Even though we are talking about a schedule, the variance is displayed in dollars. After all, time is money. To determine the variance, take the difference between the earned value and the planned value. For example, say your EV is $24,000 and your PV is $30,000. SV = EV PV EV = $24,000 PV = $30,000 EV - PV = $6,000 Because your SV is $6,000, your team isn t doing as well as you had planned with regards to the schedule. A positive number for your SV indicates that your team is ahead of schedule. You know that you re behind schedule when you have a negative number for your schedule variance. Evaluating your Variance at Completion We show you several variance formulas in the previous sections. A variance just tells you how much you vary from where you expected to be. One other item to evaluate is your Variance at Completion (VAC). VAC is the difference between what you budgeted to spend when you documented your original project plan and how much you expect to spend by the time you complete your project. To determine the VAC, you need to consider how much you budgeted to spend and, considering where you are right now, how much you estimate you will spend by the time the fat lady sings. The difference between these two is the VAC. Say your budget at completion is $120,000 and your EAC (considering where you are in the project right now) is $125,000. Here s what you do to determine the VAC: VAC = BAC EAC BAC = $120,000 EAC = $125,000 VAC = $120,000 $125,000 = $5,000
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290 Part IV: Controlling Your Software Project Table 14-3 Variance Formulas Concept Formula Cost Variance (CV) CV = EV AC Schedule Variance (SV) SV = EV PV Variance at Completion (VAC) VAC = BAC EAC Calculating cost variance (CV) How much did you plan to spend? How much did you actually spend? What s the difference? CV just tells you how much your actual costs were compared to how much you planned to spend. How much did you spend compared to how much you planned to spend? You find the answer to this question by looking at the difference between your earned value (EV) and your actual costs (AC). For example, if your EV is $24,000 and your AC is $25,000, here are the numbers: CV = EV AC EV = $24,000 AC = $25,000 EV AC = $1,000 The difference between the EV and the AC is $1,000. In this example, you spent more than you planned to spend, so you end up with a negative number. A negative number indicates that you are not doing as well as you planned; your actual costs are higher than you estimated. A positive number tells you that you are doing better than planned; you are not spending as much as you planned to spend. Because your cost variance is $1,000, your actual costs are $1,000 more than you budgeted. You have a negative cost variance, which is no reason to go out and buy party hats and paint the town purple. Calculating schedule variance (SV) Where are you in your schedule? Where did you actually plan to be in your schedule? What s the difference? SV tells you how much your schedule differs
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Chapter 14: Using Earned Value Management in Software Projects 289 keep in mind is that you want to figure out how much your cost and schedule vary from what you had originally planned. Determining the estimate to complete the project When you determine the estimate to complete (ETC) your project, you estimate how much more you should expect to spend for the rest of the project activities based on your performance thus far. You can do this mathematically without a lot of swanky formulas. Say you already know that your actual costs are $25,000, and that you know that your EAC is $125,000. So you can expect that to complete the project activities you will have to spend $125,000 $25,000, which is $100,000. You expected to spend $125,000 and you ve actually spent $25,000 thus far, so you have $100,000 more costs to completion if the variances you ve had thus far can be considered typical and you expect future variances to also be typical. Knowing that you have $100,000 left in your budget to spend is not enough information to tell you whether you re over- or underbudget. But you need to know where your project stands at this moment if you want to determine whether you re within your budget. We explain what to do with these numbers in the following sections. Uh-oh! What s your variance? Of course, there s no point in calculating all these formulas unless you determine how much the values vary from your project estimates. You use variance analysis to start figuring out if your variance is significant, what the reason for the variance is, and what, if anything, you should do about it. First you should determine your cost variance (CV). You perform a variance analysis to determine whether you re over- or underbudget and ahead of or behind schedule. This analysis provides you with the information you need to proactively make changes to get your project back on the right path. Usually, variance analysis is performed on the cost and the schedule, but you could also perform a variance analysis on project scope, risks, quality, or other measurable areas of your project. In this chapter, we focus primarily on variance analysis for costs and schedule. Table 14-3 summarizes the variance formulas we discuss in the next couple of sections.
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