Imagine you are the VP of projects looking at the health of projects, what could be the some of the possible scenarios you may face and next steps.
Radio Silence from project manager
This is the most dangerous sign , the project is lost in the Bermuda triangle, with no hope of recovery. The only way is to meet the paying client and see what can be done now.
Green status for weeks on end
This could be a water-melon color, green on the outside and red in the inside. In this case probe with others in the project to get a sense to see if green is real green.
Quality gone red
Well if Quality gone red in the early days of the project, it can be salvaged by having one or more of the following:
- Adding strong technical folks with systematic on-boarding
- Automated testing
- Second opinion on the software architecture
Cost over-run
Well now it depends on how much percentage cost is over-run and relatively how much project is accepted by client. If there is no runway left, better to mutually close the project. At the end of the day projects are executed to make profits.
Schedule over-run
This the best case and most common scenario, assuming cost and quality are in good shape, you may reach out to the client or go for soft launch if feasible.
This brings to question what can be done to forecast these well in advance. Some of the following high level metrics might help.
- Code review defect injection rate per pull-request
- Regression failures per engineering builds
- Rate of cash burn
- Percentage of acceptance of project milestones by client.
PS : The angle here is assuming that the project is an external project.
