When you have a project team and a Project Manager to manage this team, you would like to spend just enough time on managing your project. A widely used approach to achieve this is criteria and tolerances. Critical Success (or failure) Factors (CSF's) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI's). This sounds familiar doesn't it? Kaplan and Norton? Balanced Scorecard?
When you have a project, you in fact have a temporary organization with directors (you), management (PM) and organization (project team). And for this organization you will need some indicators to measure the performance of this organization. Will it work towards the desired result? And does it achieve this result within defined limits? A classic set of criteria consists of money, organization, quality, information and time. But it is up to you to drop or add any criterion you like.
Better is it not to just do what you like but what is good for your organization. Doing better what you already do very well is not useful. To improve what needs to be improved is much better. Therefor one can do a SWOT analyses on your organization and the project team. Where are the strength and weaknesses? Where are the opportunities and threads? This will help you understand what criteria you should pay attention to as they could go wrong and where you should not spend to much time on as your organization is very strong in that area.
A further nuance can be given through tolerances. Bear in mind that you can have different tolerances on different criteria and between positive and negative deflection. The interesting question is: 'What are good tolerances to work with?' I will come back on this n a next posting.
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