"What you cannot measure, you cannot manage" - Peter F. Drucker
Had a solid day in a Metrics Workshop and the above is just one of many statements that CMMI practitioners are constantly reminded off. *Putting on process engineer hat...* It is true that numbers can tell stories and processes like CMMI needs numbers to tell good (or bad) stories.
Defining and understanding metrics is an important process for an organization to determine what quantitative data is to be collected to measure projects. Analyzing the collected data will help organizations to improve their processes and optimize their methods to provide better quality in their products.
Among People, Process and Technology - process is usually the one being ignored or not properly defined and the success of projects are usually left to heroics. In layman terms, Overtime lah.
Even the finest people can’t perform at their best when the process is not understood or operating “at its best.”
Metrics are important because they tell stories to top management and allow them to measure the performance of their projects and resources. Instead of saying "Project A is late by 15 days", we can say, "Project A has a Schedule Variance of 10%" and instead of saying "All resources work OT to complete Project A", we can quantify and say, "Project A has an Effort Variance of 23.88%". The most common statement of "Customer is making a lot of changes" can also be represented by "Our Requirements Stability Index is -10.2%".
When metrics are collected through time, we can then observe the patterns of our success and failures. From there, quality and process improvements can be made.
Do you collect metrics in your projects? When your developer tells you he took 5 days (duration) to complete a task, did he use 40 hours or 60 hours (effort)? ;)
Note: CMMI is an international standard defined by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnergie Mellon University. CMMI stands for Capability Maturity Model Integration.
PS. I will put on my developer hat to talk about this in my next blog.
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