Measure Me Purple

I think there are four things you have to measure in modern program management.

1) Why? The Big Kahuna question of all program management: why are we doing this. If you're setting up a PMO, the first thing you'll need is a gateway process, which consists of asking "why?". If you've got a strategic plan and a list of critical success factors, scoring new projects on this list is easy. And of course, you do have those things, right?

2) How? How well am I following my recipe? Every organization has a recipe for success. The PMBOK is a great recipe for project management in general, and the RUP is a great recipe for software development. Most larger organizations create their own methodologies, which is as it should be. But how many of them actively mesaure to see how well they're doing against their own processes? (Shameless plug -- the MAT is the only automated tool I know that does that)

3) Who? A very simple question, really. Who is doing what? From a 50-thousand foot view, this is rarely ever asked. But on the ground, this is the problem I've found the most in larger organizations. Everybody has a tendency to gravitate to the things they like to do, and nobody really looks at the big picture to make sure there are no gaps. It's a really critical thing to watch, but tough to do effectively.

4) Results? This is the area that has the plethora of metrics. Numbers, figures, graphs -- there are more things to measure here than you can possibility imagine: billions and billions of charts. For sanity's sake, I would suggest honing this down to a small list. There's a much longer article here, maybe we can go over it later.

So there you have it. The things I would want to measure in a PMO weekly if I had a magic wand. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my magic wand (along with the money tree, which the kids tell me is somewhere in the backyard.)