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How Healthy is Your IT Project – 14 Essential KPIs
February 17th, 2020
As an IT project manager, you must ensure that the project that you have been working on is totally in control so you and your team will meet the deadline and all requirements of your client. There are several KPIs that are essential for the IT industry, as well as some assessment activities that help managers to stay on top of their projects. This article will have a keen focus on assessment and essential metrics that indicate a healthy IT project, plus external and internal factors that contribute to the success of a project.
Assessment activities
First of all, here are the four basic assessment activities you can perform in case you want to focus on the health of your IT project:
- Inspection of the correspondence to project KPIs Successful project accomplishment is not possible without constant measurements and checking the correspondence between the actual state of affairs and preliminarily established KPIs. While project stakeholders pay more attention to the outcome indicators, the project manager needs to set the representative process indicators that could warn of the trouble coming before it’s too late.
- Interim inspection Set the points of check-up before you start. These points should be defined by a system lifecycle management process. Check-ups should be performed by a team of experts that are engaged in different positions, not only engineers or coders. The cross-disciplinary group will provide a better assessment of various aspects of the project. If you have to tailor the project, this might require a revision of your previous check-up plan.
- Third-party inspections inspection can be done during any stage of the development. The core focus of inspecting a project is to determine the loopholes left behind. As a third party is assigned to perform an inspection, they are more likely to point out the drawbacks or defects that your project is embedded with.
- Tests help to determine whether the quality, operation, handling, performance, and functionality of the product meet the standards or a particular specification. Tests are usually performed at the end of product iteration or closer to the end of a project lifecycle.
Success factors of a project
According to Harold Hunt, objective project-critical success factors that matter for the health of a typical IT project would include:
- The financial status of the project must not overrun the project budget.
- Human Resources must ensure that the project is adequately staffed.
- Quality Controls will emphasize the completion of the requirements and specifications of the project. The satisfactory test results with an efficient performance will ensure the health of a project.
- Regulatory Compliance will be a satisfactory call on the completion of a project.
- Schedule Statusplays a vital role in maintaining the health of a project. The timely delivery of the project highlights professionalism and commitment.
- Scope Deliverycomprises of the scope of the project along with all the deliverables. The quality of the product must meet the expectations of the stakeholders, end product consumer,s and claims made in advertising.
Key performance indicators and metrics
Observation and measurement of your IT project progress should be meticulous and unbiased. The KPIs must be established before the start of a project. It’s important to determine what is a reasonable frequency of measurements, which metrics are snapshot-like and which are cumulative, what are the data sources and the hierarchy of metrics (severity criteria).
The KPIs relevant to a typical IT projects will include:
- Return On Investment (ROI)
- Hours spent vs Estimated hours
- Number of schedule adjustments
- Resource capacity
- Budget variance
- Cost performance index
- Line items in budget
- Number of change requests
- Customer satisfaction
- Customer loyalty
- Net promoter score
- Customer complaints
As vital is the health of your IT project, we ensure to empower your goals by strengthening the development phase of your project through the key performance indicators (KPIs) and success measures. For us, the successful development of your IT project is at the top of our priority list.
