Project Lifecycle Documentation
Percentage of projects that "pass" a control point (phase or stage gate) with all required supporting documentation.
Main Description

Overview

This is a variation of the Proposal Justification metric, in that it extends that metric to monitor whether all “required” lifecycle artifacts are produced at the right time of the project or product lifecycle. The notion of required lifecycle documents is critical to this measure. Organizations often identify output documents expected at different phases or stages of the project, but the list is often exhaustive and does not identify which must be produced. This results in teams selectively producing some artifacts and omitting others.

There are key challenges in adopting a new methodology, such as providing measurable and visual evidence that the required process is followed and communicating the value and importance that each artifact brings to the organization to all parties (project teams and executives).

Organizational changes occur only when they are clearly and openly supported by the executive team. This measure helps address two main issues:

  1. Identification of artifacts that must be produced during the lifecyle
  2. Demonstration of executives' commitment to adoption of the process

Measurement method

Total number of proposals compared to total number of required lifecycle artifacts per proposal.

Measurement analysis

Depending on the technology to manage the portfolio investment process that is in place, some of this monitoring can be achieved in a semiautomatic manner through data extracts and trending, or it can be done manually through project peer reviews or project phase gate review audits.

Example

One example of this measure is to express it as a percentage of “produced artifacts over required artifacts” by project, which produces a measure that can be compared by projects teams, by project manager, and by functional areas.