Name: What Are The Quality Metrics in Project Management?
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Quality Metrics in Project Management are those KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which are critical during the realization of a project. Smart project manager always makes sure to track them, as they provide information on every aspect of the working process. They have to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that the team is working on the proper tasks. If a project manager does not control the KPI, the risk of failure or project’s going past the deadline drastically rises.

Every project needs a dashboard – a manager should be able to forge one, basing on the most important aspects of the project (the right metrics and KPIs), or can use the right time tracking project management software that will do this for him. Here is an example of the Real Time Dashboard available in the PRO version of you time tracking software, TimeCamp:

TimeCamp’s Real-Time Dashboard

As the name suggests, this feature basically allows one to monitor the staff activity in real-time.

There are 4 different parts of that report:

Top employees in your projects (employees that reported most time in the selected period of time).
Top 10 (shows top tracked tasks within selected period of time).
Shows how much time reported is actually billable or not.
Shows what tasks are being tracked at the moment

This dashboard allows you to always keep an eye on what’s going during the work on the project, and it also helps you keep up with the changes in the budget.

TimeCamp is packed with features that facilitate work in a company. Managing a project with this time tracking software will be much easier. You can try it out for free and see for yourself!

Quality Metrics in Project Management

Here, we will discuss what are the quality metrics and how to prepare a useful KPI dashboard. First of all, the clarity of the project metric is vital, it should be as visually understandable, as possible. Also, it should be measurable and actionable.

Let’s see some of the most popular project management quality metrics:

1. PLANNED VALUE

The name says it all – it is the estimated amount of money that’s needed to finish all the planned activities and tasks on time. You can try and compare it to other metrics to have a better view of the progress of the project. You will notice if some tasks are doing better than others, and you will be able to react if some tasks will be consuming too big part of the company’s budget.

There are two simple formulas that you can use to calculate PV:

Planned value = (the hours scheduled on the project) X (hourly rate of an employee who works on the project)

Planned Value = (Planned % of tasks left to complete) X (project budget)

Example: Let’s assume you have 6 months to complete the project and $5000 budget. After 3 months your team should’ve completed 50% of the project, so there’s still 50% to go, and your budget should be around $2500. Therefore, the project planned value is 2500 USD, it’s that simple.

However, if you are at 50%, but more money was spent, it means that your Actual Cost has been higher than the Planned Value.

2. ACTUAL COST

Actual Cost KPI tells you how much money your team has actually spent on the project. As it includes factors that may appear randomly, there is no formula to calculate it. You count it by adding up all the expenses that project required.

If you have all the hours tracked, it is easy to calculate the Actual Cost spent on salaries, resources, and other factors that were needed to complete the project.

3. EARNED VALUE

Probably the one, that you will be most interested in 😉 Earned Value KPI, which is also called the Budgeted Cost of Work Performed, is responsible for displaying the results of the planned work and the budget received for completing them.

What’s next?

It’s important that you create these KPIs for every project that you and your team are working on. Use the team’s dashboard to keep everyone updated. That’s where TimeCamp may come to your aid.

Alright, those were the three primary project management metrics. The core of project management and something that every aspiring project management should know about. Let us know if you like this post, so we will prepare other descriptions of the Quality Metrics in Project Management.