After that fateful first meeting, she estimated that after five months' work, the project was only 5 percent complete. She reviewed the numbers with her CFO and other senior executives, who quickly agreed to kill the undertaking. Domeyer then launched a new project with strict time, cost and function requirements. A good project manager is the most important tool for successfully delivering a complex IT project, but even the most knowledgeable manager needs more than experience and gut feelings to close intricate IT implementation projects successfully. Not the European decimal system, but the discipline of instituting measurement programs to keep projects on schedule.
Metrics can track everything from programmer productivity to business value.
While it seems like common sense to measure a complex IT project's progress systematically, most CIOs bury metrics beneath all the other demands on their time. In fact, in a 1999 study of IT managers in 6,000 companies spanning major industries in 28 nations, Rubin Systems Inc., a consultancy in Pound Ridge, N.Y., found that only half the respondents actively use metrics. Of these, only one in 25 collects and uses them on a weekly basis. This reluctance and outright rebellion against metrics has a base of support among those who believe that such programs do little more than send up red flags when a project is in trouble. You can talk metrics until you're blue in the face.