S Curve “Patterns”
In my last post I introduced the notion of S Curves as a mechanism for managing projects. While it's not as exact as tracking to a schedule, it does provide meaningful patterns for determining project status and progress against historical baselines. It's also a quick way to analyze and gain visibility into the workings of your projects.
Project Start-up and Close-down
As we discussed, the initial flat period in the S Curve represents the start-up of your projects. The final flattening period represents the project closing. You should monitor your project start-up and close-down durations and notice a similar period for most efforts. Also become familiar with the average number of days it takes your team to ramp into a project, taking note when you exceed or surpass this average as performance indicator for follow-up action.
Project Acceleration
Project acceleration is the period of focused work in most projects. The S Curve clearly represents your work acceleration and accumulation over time. I like to compare my acceleration across similarly scoped projects, using a historical project as a baseline and then compare my current project against it. Depending on the results, again, I might see some troubling gaps that indicate a lack of expected forward progress or even a premature flattening�loss of acceleration. All of which would cause me to take a more detailed look into the dynamics that created the change.
Overlaying Milestones
By themselves, S Curves give you a graphical sense for progress. When you compare them against any historically similar projects as baselines, they can also give a comparison point to look for performance gaps. However, you need to overlay appropriately detailed project milestones (plans) against them to truly manage your projects.
For example, if you planned for a new project to begin accelerating after 5 days and it has taken 10, then you clearly have a problem. Many things could have contributed to this.
- You might have a new team that is struggling with tools or technologies for the given project and just not coming up to speed as you expected.
- You might have had a delay in resources joining your project from another project as planned. Heck -- you might look at the other projects S Curve to gain a feel for when you'll get your folks�
- It could also be that requirements have not been sufficiently finalized for the team to begin actively creating content.
You get the idea as to the possibilities. The S Curve gives you a quick indication of a problem that you need to sort out for root cause and then rectify. They also can give you a quick indication as to how effectively you've corrected the problem and how well you're accelerating through it.
Keep in mind that you can and should contrast your project S Curves with planned data (milestones and baseline expectations) and historical S Curves from similar projects (scope, complexity, type of work) in order to gain a feel for how well you are stacking up.
Read the next post in this series.
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Aberdeen on Metrics and Customer Satisfication
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SDTimes.com says “Productivity Is More Than a Hunch”
