Assessing Project Performance
During project life cycle establishing and organizing performance reporting metrics to monitor and manage project outcome is what project manager is in charge for. In order to do that the project manager will have to evaluate the project’s scope, quality, cost, time, and risks. Metrics are prepared implementation of the project and monitoring development, which help understand the project success or failure, and how this can lead to future improvements. Choosing fitting metrics is critical to every project.
So, how to choose the correct metrics to assess project performance? Appropriate metrics determine significant results for the project’s success. Effective project performance measurement system would be identified by several factors:
- First, project’s goals that drop from executive operation to management and planning stages should be clearly stated.
- To understand the project condition actual progress is compared against what was planned.
- When selecting a solution the performance data should be easy to access that will precisely show the status of the project and explain the problem.
A project manager can be sure they have chosen the correct metrics to assess the projects performance by 
making sure that they’ve included cost, completion time (schedule), and scope in their metrics. If a manager has a histogram of all of the above he or she will have a better view of what has been going on and what is anticipated for the project.
At the halfway during the project if the manager considers the cost histogram, he or she will know that there is still more money that can be spent. He or she can then look at the schedule metrics and compare to the cost. They are more than ¾ of the way through the project but have only spent half the budget so far. This looks favorable to the project manager. The project manager will then look at the chart of the scope and will compare to the above two metrics only to find out that only about half of the items in the scope have been met. This will let the project manager know that the project really has not been turning out well at all. Just by viewing the metrics of the project at a quick glance one can understand better where they are at.
