Chapter 12 Measuring Progress

All projects should keep balance on cost, schedule, and quality. How can we measure all those progress as project managers?

You might try to use simple graphs for the projects that contain many similar tasks. These graphs are extremely helpful to measure schedule performance.

Also, measuring costs accurately is critical because it equals to productivity. True cost performance can be measured with a technique called earned value reporting. “Earned value reporting uses cost data to give more accurate cost and schedule reports. It does this by combining cost and schedule status to provide a complete picture of the project.” So, you should track both cost and schedule at the same time. In addition, if you have a detailed the Work Breakdown Structure, the earned value calculations become easy. For example, 1) the WBS has defined start and finish dates, 2) the task has a tangible outcome, and 3) costs are assigned to the task.

Another way to measure progress is to have cost and schedule baselines. It presents the original project plan as approved by the stakeholders. Keeping the baseline cost and schedule goals visible is one way of holding the focus on the original goals.

Measuring progress using those tools mentioned above will help to spot the problems early and solve them.