BrightWork can define key performance metrics for your projects to determine how well you are managing the plan. This article will explore how to best leverage metrics at the Project Office reporting level.

Basic Project Metrics

BrightWork comes with pre-configured metrics at the project level that keep track of Schedule tracking to plan (Time), Cost tracking to budget (Cost), Quality tracking (Quality), Overdue Tasks, and Risk Exposure, to name a few.

The basic Key Performance Metrics at the Project level are:

• Time – Is the project on schedule?
• Cost – Is the project on budget % variance to budget?
• Quality – The number of open issues. Are project Issues being managed?
• Risk – Is the Risk level for the project acceptable for the desired outcome?

Other metrics to consider are:

• Overdue Items – What percentage of open items are overdue?
• Late Issues – Number of late issues?
• Open tasks – Number of open tasks?

Project Office Metrics

Performance Measures that make sense at the Project Office level are those that confirm your Project Management processes are in control.  Groups will want to take a statistical analysis approach to ensure the Project Office performance is within the standards you expect.  Some recommended Key Performance Metrics at the Project Office level are:

• Health in Danger – Ratio of projects marked health in danger to all open projects.
• Late Projects – Ratio of late projects to all open projects.
• Quality (Open Issues) – Average number of open issues across all active projects.
• Cost – Same as at Project level – % variance to total Project Office budget.
• Risk – Average Risk exposure value across all active projects.
• Open Projects – A count of active projects as a comparison point for Late Projects, Health in Danger Projects.

What is in BrightWork?

All of the Project level metrics are already set up in the Project site templates.  The same metrics are also set up in the Project Office metrics.

We will need to add some additional BrightWork report definitions to calculate the values we need at the Project Office level.  Then we will create metrics that will replace out of the box metrics with the recommended measures in this article.

Basic steps for Project Office Key Performance Metrics

1. Setup Report definitions to capture metric values from the project sites. We will make copies of the Active Project Metric Report definition and change the CAML query filter to each specific metric.
2. Create Project Office metrics that use the reports to capture the data.
3. Build reports for Project Office KPI Performance: Metric Scorecard, Metric Tiles, and Metric History Graphs.

Use Custom BrightWork Report definitions to collect the Project Office statistics

All of the recommended measures are based on project metrics for Health, Time, Cost, and Quality (Open Issues).  A report that gathers the average metric values for these metrics can be used in a defined Project Office metric for the Project Office measures.  For example, the average risk exposure at the Project Office level can be defined using the Metric value column for Risk and take the average across all the projects.

1. 1. First, create copies of the Active Project Metrics report definition in the BrightWork library for each Project Office measure. In our example, “Risk Project Metric”.
   2. Edit the Report definition in Report Editor.
   3. Scroll down to the List Query Templates section and click on “List Type”.

1. Replace the CAML Query on the List Type to the following:

<Where>

<And>

<Eq>

<FieldRef Name=”bwMetricId” />

<Value Type=”Text”>Risk</Value>

</Eq>

<Eq>

<FieldRef Name=”bwMetricIsActive” />

<Value Type=”Boolean”>1</Value>

</Eq>

</And>

</Where>

This adds a filter to the report definition to look for the active Risk metric ID only.  Repeat this for the Quality metric.  Be sure to change the bwMetricId value to “Quality”.

5. For counting the number of Late Projects and In Danger Projects (Time, Health) , use this CAML Query. Reference the Metric ID appropriate for the report.

<Where>

<And>

<And>

<Eq>

<FieldRef Name=”bwMetricId” />

<Value Type=”Text”>Time</Value>

</Eq>

<Eq>

<FieldRef Name=”bwMetricIsActive” />

<Value Type=”Boolean”>1</Value>

</Eq>

</And>

<Eq>

<FieldRef Name=”bwMetricIndicatorStatus” />

<Value Type=”Integer”>2</Value>

</Eq>

</And>

</Where>

6. Create or edit the Project Office Metrics in the Project Office for:
   1. Health in Danger – a count of Projects where the Health Indicator is Red. It is compared to Open Projects count as a percentage.
   2. Schedule in Danger – a count of Projects where the Time Indicator is Red. It is compared to Open Projects count as a percentage
   3. Cost – edit to be a percentage of total Project Office budget. (This is the same as the Project Level Cost metric)
   4. Quality – Average number of open issues across all open projects. Compare to 0.
   5. Risk – Average risk exposure across all open projects. Compare to 0.

Build Dashboards to display Project Office Performance

Now you can create a Project Office Dashboard that displays these key metrics.  Update Metric Tiles on the Home Page to include the five recommended Metrics.

Modify the Scorecard to include these metrics.