Performer Driver’s

Questions: Describe the project, the approach that was taken at the time and the lessons learnt through reflective practice of Performer driver isn project management capacity. Refer to specific reflective tools and techniques using the guide book attached. Demonstrate a focus on the reflective aspect of how the project was managed and using performance drivers methodology, be able to demonstrate an improved outcome if this approach had been applied to the project selected. Also see additional paper Writing on Project Management supplied by the Editor of the Project Manager for additional requirements. Answers: Abstract This report is constructed with an aim of understanding how performance based metrics as a method for measuring of performance can be used in combination with project management principles and methodologies so as to improve the project performance. The report covers the basics of one of the chosen method that is widely used by organization for measuring performance in business and the same is called Balanced Score Card. The perspectives of balanced score card are bring applied to the project management framework so as to develop a methodology that empowers project management practice by enabling comprehensive performance control process through the use of strategic metrics in addition to traditional performance measurement methods used in practice. For a practical understanding of how BSC can be used with project management, a customized methodology called Adjusted Balanced Score Card that was identified and the same was used for planning the performance control for an identified IT project. The project involves development of an ecommerce learning portal for which ABSC was used as the measuring tool for project progress such that the same could be used for monitoring project progress in an efficient manner. The report contains details of a real project with step by step process that was used for development of project balanced score card. Further, the report would present reflections on what was learned when the theories of BSC were applied to the real project case in a company for the management and monitoring of an IT project. The reflection would also include an understanding of the practical aspects of ABSC and how the same could be utilized in future projects. Introduction As per the Wall Street Journal, around 42% of IT projects are abandoned before they could be completed. Every year, American organizations together face over $105 of losses because of project failure. While traditional project success was measured only considered only the operational outcome, the success is actually affected in other ways as well. Some major barriers that lead to such high rate of failure of projects are lack of understanding of strategy, management impacts and of people but they were not been a part of assessment in tradition methods of project success measurement. While project managers can talk about the ability of a project to get deliveries within schedule and within allotted costs, they struggle to identify if the project has delivered its strategic value to the company. Main reason behind this challenge was that strategy was an intangible object and thus, could not be measured in monetary terms and this inability to convert strategic perspective into measureab le dimensions was making it difficult for project managers to assess the strategic performance of a project. (Norrie, 2014). In the discipline of project management, as assessment of project with respect its performance is traditionally done by exploring the impacts of and on its triple constraints including time, cost and quality. However, over the years of development project management principles, a need has been realized to have an added dimension of project management when considering its outcome. This suggested use of performance based measures for analyzing the outputs of a project. The traditional performance measures including triple constrains only measure the product outcome of a project. However, there is more to a project than a product. It is more of an experience that is delivered to the stakeholders of a project. Thus, stakeholder management has become a widely used practice wile assessing a project methodology. Stakeholder benefits lead to customer satisfaction which can build upon competitive advantage for the brand and the goodwill can then convert into financial rewards for an organization or a brand. This has led to a surge in demand for measurement of stakeholder satisfaction which can be done by using certain performance based measures like Balance Score Card which allowed measuring of not just the tangible assets in terms of money, which was done in traditional methods for measuring project outcome, but also made way to including tangible outcomes in assessment by attaching monetary value to the same. Figure 1: On Strategy With the use of BSC, an organization can assess its project form multiple perspectives including financial, customer specific, process and growth. It also allows for determination of the cause and effect relationships between different dimensions of a project. This is possible as the method allows a company to have an established measure for every goal of the project as well as all the initiatives that lead to development of the project. Also, the use of BSC modifies the triple constraints triangle by including strategy as one deliverable such that a project is considered successful only when it delivers good quality, on time, within budget and on-strategy. Balance Score Card Balance Score Card is a framework that is used for translating the vision and strategy of an organization into operational terms and provides a balanced measure of all the perspectives that exist on a project including financial, customer, internal and growth perspectives. When applying the principles of Balance Score Card, a P-BSC may be prepared addressing all key issues of project and needs of its stakeholders with objectives to reduce risks and assure alignment of project to organizations strategic outcome. BSC deals with four perspectives of a project that include customer, financial, internal business processes and learning growth. Customer perspective deals with understanding of customer who is made the focus of business processes that are practiced with an aim to satisfy their needs. When considering this perspective, performance of a project can be measured using customer centric metrics such as lead time and quality of project outcome. Financial perspective explores data on risk assessment, funding, cost-benefit, cash flow, market share, growth, revenues, operational expenses, asset turnover and so on. Internal perspective involve managers into the working of the project and usually involves checking if higher level targets are successfully decomposed to convert to clear targets for decision making and actions for lower level of the staff. Learning and growth perspective involves learning of employees, their training provisions, corporate culture, communication, self-improvement strategies and so on. Success of project would be measured by ability of a company to innovate and learn continuously(KAZI, RADOSAV, NIKOLI, CHOTALIYA, 2011). To understand how BSC can be used for specific projects, a discipline of IT project management can be chosen to build focus for a better understanding. In case of IT projects, several researchers in the area of project management including Alleman (2003) and Brock (2003) have suggested integration of BSC and PM to create a balanced approach to project management. A framework called Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (CObiT) is been widely used on software and IT projects for linking business goals to IT goals and obtaining performance measurement metrics based on BSC framework. Several project management methodologies have been combined with BSC principles this way to create modified methodologies such as Agile Balanced scorecard that puts emphasis on measurement of teamwork, reliability, performance and velocity of key business metric categories. Another approach for using BSC in IT projects is taken in the Adjusted BSC Framework which adjusts the components of BSC to make way for improvement of performance of an IT project. This modified the perspectives including Finance to consider project costing, customers perspective to stakeholder perspective, learning including focus to specific areas like quality and risk and internal processes referring to project processes. This added some metrics to project management performance measurement such as Lag Indicators like Earned Value Management (EVM), Budget Variance analysis, lead indicators and so on. Figure 2: Strategy Map Example When using BSC in combination with the Project management disciplines, a strategic value can be added to the project which improves the shareholder value of a project. A stakeholder value can be created with improvements in revenues and in productivity at the same time. Various perspectives of BSC can add to this value creation process at each stage. As per the strategy map model defined by Kaplan and Norton, learning and development provide the key inputs to internal processes that are made to work in alignment with the customer value proposition to achieve operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership which in turn affects the financial performance of the organization. The involvement of different perspectives defined in the BSC methods reveal the importance of intangible elements like employee competencies, leadership skills, corporate culture, and so on and also allows create metrics for each of these to measure the performance of a project through conversion o f the intangible elements into numeric value metrics allowing an efficient and clear monitoring of progress of the project. A balance scorecard on one side adds four perspectives of a project in its monitoring process, on the other side it defines specific objectives, measures, targets and strategic actions required for each of those perspectives. This allows a project manager to understand how a strategy can be formulated for specific perspective, how the progress could be measured in order to achieve specific objectives, what are the target values that can be used for measurement of the progress and what specific actions are required to achieve set objectives in a project. Some examples of the measures include ROI which is a financial measure, market share which is customer perspective, on-time delivery makes internal process perspective and employee turnover deals with learning and growth perspective(Snapka Copikova, 2011). Guiding Principles of BSC Kaplan also defines some guiding principles for using best practices of BSC in case of projects. These include: Translation of strategy into operational terms: For an organization to perform, the value it provides must exceed the sum of the value provided by its specific parts that are linked through an organizational strategy. In the reporting structure on a project, thus, strategic themes must be embedded. The BSC does not act as a strategy formulation tool but only makes a presentation of the complete view of strategy and thus, these steps have to be completed before a BSC can be made. Organization to be aligned with strategy: To be able to use the BSC efficiently, a number of strategic themes may be developed that may be complementing or supporting other themes in a way to create a balance in the organization. Themes can be identified by identifying strategic outcomes and by dividing the strategy into general categories of different projects. Every strategic theme must have own hypothesis and cause and effect relationships. With strategic themes, corporate roles involving creation of value for each business unit must also be identified. Strategy must be responsibility of everyone and not just strategy or project manager: Scorecard allows cascading of lower level departmental scores but it would not serve the purpose if the employees do not buy in and thus, for BSC to deliver successful results, employees have to understand the value and importance of BSC for the project. Further, to keep them motivated and interested in the use of BSC, personalized balanced score cards can be prepared to be a part of their proposal. Before a strategy can be practically launched, these employees need to be trained as well as be used for testing of specific strategies. Strategic objectives must be embedded into various aspects of organization: Strategic objectives can be embedded into individual personal and team objectives of a project to able to make them aligned with the BSC key objective of the project. This can be done in several ways such as by using super bowl approach which involves creation of awareness about the importance of achieving targets for employees, strategic initiatives alignment through linking of routine jobs with projects, integration with planning, integration with Human resource, and so on(Murby Gould, 2005). BSC in IT Project: Case Study For the purpose of practical understanding of use of BSC with Project Management practice, an actual IT project that involved development and implementation of ecommerce learning portal for B2C business has been studied. The project life cycle had 7 major phases including requirement gathering, designing and portal development, content development, e-learning portal establishment, pilot testing, production strategy and continuous improvement. ABSC framework was implemented to manage and assess the performance of the project that began with defining of project objectives and linking of the same with every phase of the project life cycle. The identified objectives for the development of e-learning portal included: Increasing the penetration of deliveries by reaching out to a wider audience Facilitation of online learning for skills upgrading in ecommerce domain Making learning affordable by reducing costs by 50% Based on these objectives, performance indicators were identified. For increasing delivery penetration, activities that were required to be done included requirement gathering which could be completed by taking sign-off, development of multi-language capability, and set of an easy interface that could be measured for its performance through testing. For improving availability of services for learning skills, designing were to be done next and specific features that were to be implemented were scheduled. For continuous development of ecommerce knowledge base in the field of ecommerce, the infrastructure that was to develop was required to be both robust and scalable with a content management system with capability to manage updates with ease. For reduction in learning cost of the customers using the portal, the project manager decides to use fixed price per participant model using shared services. For the measurement of the above mentioned objectives for understanding their achievement and performance of the project, a traceability matrix with respect to major project phases including requirement gathering, design and development and testing could be prepared as follows: Project objectives Requirement Gathering Portal Design and development Testing Increasing delivery penetration Project Sign off Multi-lingual capabilities User testing Availability of features for anytime learning Multiple indicators Reduction in costs of learning Multiple indicators Once, the objectives were clarified with understanding of their relationships within each phase, the next step of project management in the ABSC approach was to develop Lag Indicators. These indicators could be identified for each perspective of ABSC including finance, stakeholders, process and learning. Lag indicators would be used for defining if the project went as per planned schedule or within budget. The lag indicators that were identified were considered for measurement of performance through the use of certain target measures for these specific knowledge areas including cost and risk as described in the table below: PM Knowledge areas Objectives Indicator Target Measure Cost Less than 5% of cost overrun CPI Less than 1.05 Risk Less than 5% of risk impact High risk items with over USD10,000 cost to be monitored Less than 3 such items facing risks Just as lag indicators identified problems in the project related to cost and schedule, lead indicators were used for understanding achievements of the project. This involved an understanding of requirements of all business users, assurance of sign off with requirements of each process owner incorporated, conducting training sessions for e-learning and limited iterations. Objective Lag Indicator Target Measure Responsibility Requirement Gathering Sign off with all requirements of process owners included Within 5 working days after submission Process owner All team members participated and all requirements obtained 100% Project Management team No incomplete or partially complete information Forms, templates and user reviews collection Project Team and end users Just as the lag indicators were mapped against each perspective of ABSC, lead indicators could also be mapped using same technique. Once all indicators were identified, the next step that was followed was combining of these indicators for establishing a cause and effect relationship between each of the measures, perspectives and project knowledge areas. This included understanding of how these indicators related to each project phase. For instance, sign off requirement which is one of the indicators in the requirement gathering phase could result into scope creep if not management properly affecting other project knowledge areas such as time, cost and risks. Based on these relationships, the indicators with high impacts on project, in case the indicators are not managed well, can be tracked as identified in the following table: Lead Indicator Effects (Impact) Impact Objectives Sign off Time overrun Incomplete requirements Incomplete information Quality; testing; high risk items Service delivery Cost of delivery Once, all the above steps were fulfilled, it enabled project manager of the e-learning portal project to monitor the project progress against each of the identified objectives, performance indicators and targets in an integrated manner that allowed them to track progress with full understanding of relationships between different elements which allowed good management of stakeholder expectations(Vasudevan, 2012). A comprehensive Adjusted Balanced Score Card can be prepared by using each of these measures including all perspectives, objectives, measures, and targets. This comprehensive scorecard would then make it possible for a project manager to have a complete strategic view of the project and use the same for monitoring its progress. Update strategy with revision Strategy BSC Feedback Vision Goals Themes Financial Perspective Minimum Expenses and Maximum return Objectives Minimum expenses Measures: CPI Targets: Minimum CPI Stakeholder Perspective Resource Availability Stakeholder expectations Objectives: Requirement gathering Measures: Requirement sign off Targets: all member participation Input to decision Making Internal Perspective Management of processes Objectives: Reduce risks; ensure compliance; manage change Compare results Measures: Scope creep; High risk items; compliance, planned iterations Targets: Less than 5% scope creep, cost overrun, schedule overrun; less than 3 high risk items; OPA compliance; less than 2 iterations Learning and Growth Perspective Continuous learning Objectives: Knowledge base Measures: Lessons learnt database for future use Targets: record quality issues, lessons learned, lead practices Operational Decision Making Conclusions This report was created for studying performance based measurement methods used in business context by applying the same to the project management practice and understand the impact or improvements that can be brought about with this combination of the two disciplines. IT was found that major project failure were caused because of incapability of project organizations to achieve strategic results as there was a lack on the methods that could be used for measuring strategic performance as it was an intangible measure. It was found that BSC, a widely used method in the area of strategic management provide this capability of measuring intangible areas of a project and thus, the same was applied to a specific case of IT project to understand how BSC could be used for making project monitoring and performance measurement process more efficient. The case was studied with the use of Adjusted Balanced Score card, a method defined for the use of BSC in project management practice. There were other performance based methods as well other approaches to incorporation of BSC perspectives on project but ABSC provided a simplified learning which is why it was chosen to understand a specific case of the project. References Bonham, S. 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