Projekt-Tracking bei General Motors

Red Light, Green Light

01.10.2001
Von Tracy Mayor

Give Them What They Need

Thompson and Clarke emphasize that the project dashboardsucceeds because it's supported by a host of more in-depthreporting mechanisms in the background. In effect, thedashboard is the tip of the iceberg for those times whenmanagers need to see only the tip. If and when they want tosee more, they most often turn next to the "4-up report," aone-page, four-quadrant report that gives a detailedsynopsis of a project's status by financial, deliverables,milestones and risk activities. And large, complex projectslike Y2K are often subject to an additional earned-valueevaluation, where points are assigned to each task and anumber value, obtained at certain milestones, objectivelyindicates how well the project is performing.

Additionally, a project-approval process that Thompson calls"grueling" weeds out weak project proposals at the outset.

When it comes time to distribute project-trackingassessments obtained with its project dashboard, GM NorthAmerica's tool is as flexible as it is simple. An individualproject manager might distribute to her immediatesupervisors the entire dashboard, with status colors showingfor all four categories it measures. By contrast, a reportto a business unit CIO or regional CIO summarizing thestatus of all the projects of a particular business unitwould most likely show just a single color per project, witha small text comment when appropriate.

In addition, GM North America's Process, Integration andQuality Assurance group, which administers the dashboard,assigns point values to colors (green, 2; yellow, -1; andred, -3). That helps maintain rolling, 12-month views of allprojects and all operational metrics, such as networkdowntime and help desk response times, for a given divisionor business unit. Those reports allow IT to obtain acomparative picture of overall performance over time. "Thescores out of context mean nothing. But over the course of ayear, it helps us gauge stability," Clarke says.

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