Measuring Project Pulse
We only get better by measuring our performance. We all know this. Top athletes practice it. The best professionals take time for reflection. Business teams track KPIs. So why doesn’t our team building and project management software platforms do this?
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Why are we asking these questions?
TeamFit users are asking us for this. They want better insight into how projects are actually going, insight you cannot get from task updates and milestones.
Even more important is the impact of a project. Did it meet its goals? Or did it just tick off the deliverables? What were the actual outcomes, good and bad?
Each project creates waves that spread out long after the project is completed and interact with other projects. Understanding the outcomes of projects is critical to building a project improvement cycle.
We need to take the best practices of W. Edwards Deming (Plan Do Check Act) and John Boyd (Observe Orient Decide Act) and apply them within and across projects.
At the end of the day, what our customers really want to do is impact project success. The way to start is to predict project success and then track outcomes over time.
TeamFit builds a detailed skill graph that shows how skills and people combine on projects. (You can see a bit more about this on the TeamFit Platform page). We are extending this graph to capture the vectors that impact success. Then, if we can track these, we can run our machine-learning platform on this graph to find the patterns associated with successful projects. This will let us generate real time predictions of project success and indicate the risk factors. Project managers will have great visibility into the factors predicting project success, whether these be skills matches, timelines, social predictions or data from project management systems and status reports. Executives will have great visibility into the future and know when they should step in.
Everyone will benefit from understanding which projects have met their goals and what the outcomes have been.
If you are interested in contributing to this work please contact us.