Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
make appropriate tradeoff decisions. Not all project dimensions can be constraints.
Project managers must have some latitude to react to schedule slips, scope growth,
staff turnover, and other eventualities. A successful manager adjusts the degrees of
freedom so as to let the team achieve the project's success criteria—its drivers—
within the limits imposed by the constraints.
11.1.4 Derive Project Success Criteria
Each business objective should imply technical success criteria you can monitor
prior to release. The development team can't directly meet a business objective of
''Capture a 40 percent market share within 12 months''. However, they can
decompose that objective into specific project actions and product features aligned
with achieving the market share target. Disconnects between success criteria and
business objectives give stakeholders no way to assess whether the project is likely
to meet those objectives. Success criteria shape many aspects of your project,
beginning with the functional and nonfunctional requirements specifications. If the
stakeholders understand the project's principal business objectives and success
criteria, it's easier to make decisions about which proposed product features and
characteristics are in scope and which are not. For example, performance goals are
often written against either internal benchmarks or external industry reference
data. A goal, for example, might compare a new search engine's performance to
that of the prior version and also to the performance of a competing product under
some set of standard conditions.
Such success criteria allow the project team design tests that measure whether
performance, reliability, or throughput goals are being met. Trends in these mea-
sures may provide early warning that you might miss a success target, so the team
can either take corrective action or redefine the success criteria. Not all of these
success criteria can be considered a top priority. You'll have to make thoughtful
tradeoff decisions to ensure that you satisfy your most important business priorities.
Without clear priorities, team members can work at cross-purposes, which can often
lead to rework, frustration and stress. Weigh your success criteria based on how
strongly they align with achieving the critical business objectives, so team members
will know which ones are essential and which are merely desirable. Consider
summarizing your success information similarly to the example form illustrated in
Table
11.3
. List each business objective, the stakeholder who provided it, corre-
sponding project success criteria, and each criterion's method of measurement along
with a well thought out priority weight. Use the stakeholder list to verify that you
haven't overlooked any important business objectives. You don't need to associate
all stakeholders with every business objective, but every objective should be
important to some stakeholder. If you clearly define what success means at the
beginning of your project, you greatly increase the chances of achieving it at the end.
Understanding your stakeholders' interests, writing clear business objectives, and
