What is true sense of quality in IT projects?

Hi all

Happy New Year 2009!!!

I am seeing some project management techniques and most of them are focused on quantitative approach.

How we can measure & manage knowledge & creativity in quantitative units? How much it is effective to achieve true sense of quality?

Is any project management technique is based on qualitative approach?

Please share your experience and opinion. It will be great help for me.

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards

Ram

Ram Srivastava

Team (Innovation, Marketing & Execution) Lead @ YMSLI. Open Source, LAMP, Agile, CMMI. Success story in recession!!

I have this discussion pretty regularly. Typically, PMs and PMOs become focused on budget and schedule to the exclusion of any other metrics or considerations. As indicators of general project health, they’re not bad. But when organizations start equating them with “project success”, We end up with projects that are deemed “successful” but often fail to deliver any business value. It also leads to a number of bad behaviors such as throwing warm bodies at late projects, skimping on QA, poor risk management, code-like-hell programming, requirements disconnects, poor documentation and traceability, etc. Personally, I believe that there is no greater threat to project success than focusing on the wrong metrics. The approach that I’ve generally tried to promote is a process-centric one. Establish the right processes and behaviors to capture and manage requirements, maintain stakeholder involvement, control changes and scope creep and to ensure proper QA throughout. Then measure process compliance and customer acceptance at each stage (quantitative) with customer satisfaction (qualitative) shortly after major milestones. In addition, when scoping the project, determine what the customer’s real KPIs (key Performance Indicators) and KGI/CSFs (Key Goal Indicators/Critical Success Factors) are and include them in the tracking processes. Having that discussion can be surprising. Unfortunately, you need to have somewhat mature processes to be able to implement something like this and you also need some sort of neutral oversight to review process exceptions to determine if the exception was appropriate or just laziness. A project shouldn’t be penalized for bypassing process steps that aren’t providing business value. However, those decisions need to be made consciously and with some form of review/audit to keep people honest.