Tag Archives: Performance Measurement Baseline

Glen Alleman’s new book, Performance-Based Project Management: Increasing the Probability of Project Success is focused on the practical steps needed to get to ‘done’ – the project’s deliverables out there and working.

Performance-Based Project Management shows readers how they can increase the probability of project success, detailing a straightforward plan for avoiding surprises, forecasting performance, identifying risk, and taking corrective action to keep a project a success. Glen has distilled the practical essence out of the complex project management processes defined in a range of standards to focus on what works starting with the Five Immutable Principles of Project Success.  The five key things to know about any project are:

1. What do we want ‘done’ and what does ‘done’ look like when we’re finished?
2. What work do we need to do to get from where we are now to ‘done’ (by who, when and how)?
3. Do we actually have enough skills (capability), money, people and other resources to do this work in a sensible timeframe?
4. What problems and issues are we likely to encounter getting to ‘done’ and how can we manage them?
5. How will we know we are making progress towards ‘done’ and how will know when we have arrived (refer first point above)?

The next step is to apply the Five Practices to refine and deliver the project’s scope:

1. Define the needed capabilities
2. Define the technical and operational requirements needed to implement those capabilities
3. Establish a Performance Measurement Baseline for performing the work needed to implement the requirements (plan the work)
4. Implement the work defined in the Performance Measurement Baseline (work the plan)
5. Perform continuous risk management on everything you do on the project.

And then managing the work requires five processes:

1. Organise the project work with a WBS and an OBS to show what is being delivered and who is responsible
2. Plan, schedule and budget the work
3. Account for the time and money used to implement the deliverables
4. Analyse the variances that occur between the ‘actuals’ and the plan and understand the cause and the corrective options.
5. Maintain the integrity of the data.

There’s a lot more in the book derived from Glen’s 30 years of experience as a program manager and performance management consultant in the aerospace, defence, and enterprise information technology fields. He is well known in the project management community through his Herding Cats blog.

To preview the book see: http://www.amazon.com/Performance-Based-Project-Management-Increasing-Probability/dp/0814433308