Published on April 13, 2022
On April 13, 2022, Raghavan N, Quality Head - Transportation Business Unit, Tata Elxsi, and Arun Kumar Goyal, Quality Head - Innovation Design and Visualisation, conducted an EDGE webinar that highlighted the importance of mapping metrics and critical concern areas in a project through a project health indicator (PHI).
With the help of a real case study from Tata Elxsi, they explained how to regularly assess projects' performance by mapping quality metrics from all phases (requirements, development, testing and release) to identify potential issues and take corrective actions.
Project performance assessment is a core aspect of project management. It is the process of monitoring and evaluating the progress of a project to ensure that the end product meets quality standards. This webinar reviewed Tata Elxsi's conscious efforts to implement PHIs and their benefits and limitations.
The project performance assessment through the PHI is a data-driven tool that allows a complete overview of the project’s progress. It provides an at-a-glance view of a project's current status and tracks performance over time to improve project quality and success. The PHI is easy to use and requires minimal training to implement.
The tool uses algorithms to automatically assess the health and identify any potential issues of a project. The health assessment results are displayed in colour codes representing the RAG report of project status, red, yellow, and green.
By observing the indicators of a project's performance early on and throughout its duration, you can predict critical issues or variations in performance before they become too costly to fix. The PHI helps you take action early to ensure that your projects are successful and on time.
The benefits of a PHI include:
- The ability to capture the essence of each project's health provides a quick and easy assessment that senior management can easily understand.
- A single metric that provides an early warning of potential problems and enables corrective action to be taken before it becomes too late.
- An indicator can be used when managing multiple projects at once, allowing for a comparison between projects and highlighting potential problem projects.
- A holistic measure of project health is not just limited to cost and schedule performance.
PHIs serve a dual purpose: They help clarify what's going on and help identify the areas that need to be addressed. But they only work when those areas are clearly defined.
The process-focused approach to PHIs limits their utility and has limited adoption. Tata Elxsi realised that a new system is required that focuses on the value of PHIs to the broader project management community.
The PHI 2.0 indicator will generate reports on detailed performance and risk analysis based on the health assessment. The speakers proposed a solution for a project performance assessment based on a health indicator framework, a combination of process, governance, and system indicators.
The highly interactive and engaging webinar unravelled a range of insights and concluded with a Q&A round.