Types of Project Metrics

Metric is an inevitable part of any piece of work being performed. It’s a system in place to measure the excellence or rather performance of work delivered. Any work that is not controlled and measured can prove the equivalent to incorrect work being delivered. Technology grows at a tremendous pace that enterprises always strive in keeping defined project metrics.

Project metrics can be stated as pre-defined or identified measures or benchmarks, which the deliverable is supposed to attain in order to get the expected value. With clearly defined project metrics, the business groups are able to assess the success of a project. Though certain unstated measures like if the project was delivered on time and within the budget, existed ever since the advent of enterprises, the need for more analytics in this area has seen a high spike. There are different types of project metric analysis systems in place across the industry like costing, resource, hours-based, etc. Let me take you through some common project metrics that are much related to the person-hours delivered in a project.

Effort Variance (Ev)

It’s a derived metric, which gives you an alert of having control over the project. Let there be a project A with the below current attributes :

Planned effort: 100
Actual effort: 150
Project progress percentage: 50

Therefore, at 50 % – 150 Hrs taken
then at 100 % – X Hrs will be taken

X = (100*150)/50 = 300 Hrs., where X is a predicted value for the effort within which the project is going to complete.

Hence, the variance Ev = ((Actual – Planned)/Planned)*100
= ((300-100)/100)*100 = 200 %
The variance predicted indicates that the project requires attention or it would complete at a much higher cost in terms of the effort delivered.

Schedule Variance (Sv)

The Schedule variance also has the same calculation in which the number of days is considered instead of the hours.

Weighted Defect Rate

WDR is a defect metric calculated based on the weightage assigned to the reported bugs. The weightage depends on two factors – severity and reporter.

Weightage against severity in descending order: Block, Crash, Major, Minor
Weightage against the reporter in descending order: Client, SQC, Team

And the rate is calculated against the total planned hours for the project.

Quality Costs:

Cost of Quality: It’s the total time spent on review activities in the project. Examples are requirements review, design review, code review, test plan review, team meetings for clarifications and client calls, etc.

COQ = (Total Review hrs / Total project planned hours)*100

Cost of Detection: The total time spent on the testing activity is considered the cost of detection.

Cost of Detection= (Total Testing Hrs/ Total Project planned Hrs)*100

Cost of Failure: The total time spent on rework in the project is considered the cost of failure. Rework includes bug fixing, design change, test plan change, etc.

Cost of Failure (Cost of Poor Quality- CoPQ) = (Total Rework or bug fixing Hrs/ Total Project Planned hours)*100

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