project reporting

Submitted by pm15127 on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 09:47.

Project Management

other than scope, schedule and cost, what statistics would you put in your project report?

Submitted by MD_144 on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 15:51.

quality

Those don't sound like statistics, but that's just me being pedantic.

If you have any quality measures, include them. The measures, of course, depend on the project, but a good place to look is either statistics on rework, or measures you take to monitor quality. If you're designing a car, how many drawings have been reviewed, and how many changes resulted from those reviews? When you get to crash-testing, how does the new design compare to existing models for fatal headstrikes?

If you don't have quality measures... why don't you have quality measures? If you need some, figure out what quality measure the customer cares about, and start tracking them. If it's hard (like it is for software, but that's another story) find a proxy measure that at least shows you are thinking about quality.

I run software projects, and I only show one chart: A standard burndown chart. The Wikipedia example is good enough to give you the idea, though mine is for the project rather than for an iteration.

I don't show cost, because the beancounters show planned vs actual costs in their presentation, and I'll get asked about it if I'm very far over or under. I don't show a quality chart because my internal customer doesn't care about quality, they care about done. But that's another story.

md-144

Submitted by dhkramer on Sat, 07/25/2009 - 17:38.