Project Management Metrics, Key Performance Indicators, and Dashboards: On-Demand

Description

The ultimate purpose of metrics and dashboards is not to provide more information, but to provide the right information to the right person at the right time using the correct media and in a cost effective manner. This is certainly a challenge. As computer technology has grown, so has the ease by which information can be generated and presented to management and stakeholders. Today, everyone seems concerned about information overload. Unfortunately, the real issue is non-information overload. In other words, there are too many useless reports which cannot easily be read and which provide readers with too much information, much of which may have no relevance.

We are now struggling to find better ways of communicating. Our focus today is on the unique needs of the receiver of the information. The need to make faster and better decisions mandates better information. Humans have a variety of ways by which they can absorb information. We must address all of these ways in the selection of the metrics and the design of the dashboards.

The three most important words in a stakeholder's vocabulary are, 'Making informed decisions.' This is usually the intent of effective stakeholder relations management. Unfortunately, this cannot be accomplished without an effective information system based upon meaningful and informative metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

For decades we believed that the only information that needed to be passed on to the client and the stakeholders were information related to time and cost. Today, we realize that true project status cannot be determined from time and cost alone. Each project may require its own unique metrics and key performance indicators. The future of project management may very well be metric-driven project management.

Information design has finally come of age. Effective communications is the essence of information design. Today, we have many small companies that are specialists in information design. Larger companies may maintain their own specialist team and call these people graphic designers, information architects or interaction designers. These people maintain expertise in the visual display of both quantitative and qualitative information necessary for informed decision-making.

Traditional communications and information flow has always been based upon tables, charts and indexes that were hopefully organized properly by the designer. Today, information or data graphics combines points, lines, charts, symbols, images, words, numbers, shades and a symphony of colors to convey the right message easily. What we know with certainty is that dashboards and metrics are never an end in themselves. They go through continuous improvement and are constantly updated. In a project management environment, each receiver of information can have different requirements and may request different information during the life cycle of the project.