Quelle: CIO USA
WITH HUNDREDS OF NEW IT initiatives rolledout in an average year, GM North America is up to itshubcaps in technology projects. But the venerable carmanufacturer is wary of turning project tracking into aproject unto itself. The solution: an easy to use, easy tointerpret project "dashboard" that uses three signalsinstantly familiar to anyone who's ever sat behind thewheel: green light, yellow light, red light.
In 1999, feeling that GM North America lacked a formal,common way to report metrics among workgroups and tomanagement, several members of the IT leadership teamdeveloped a handful of instruments designed to track projectstatus. But useful as they were, those reports were stilltoo detailed for senior managers, who wanted only to keep aneye on the progress of projects many levels below them.
"When you get higher in management, your questions are moreabout the overall health of a project, not the details,"explains David S. Clarke, director of IT operations andinfrastructure for GM North America in Detroit. "As we werereporting on projects to upper management, we found that wewere giving them a view that was too detailed and notconsolidated enough."
So a group of leaders from the CIO's project managementoffice set to work developing a dashboard that color-codesthe status of all IT projects: green when it's progressingas planned, yellow when at least one key target has beenmissed, red when the project is significantly-even if justtemporarily-behind. "The dashboard is a signaling method;it's a way to send a message fast," Clarke says.
From inception, each and every project is tracked and ratedmonthly on four dashboard criteria: performance to budget,performance to schedule, delivery of business results andrisk. The individual measures and triggers used to track thestatus of those four criteria are determined at the outsetof the project by the project manager, a planning managerand other relevant executives.
Each of the four categories is then assigned a color statuseach month by the project manager after he reviews thatcategory's relevant measures. Finally, the overall projectis assigned a color for the month. By design, the technologyitself is as simple to use as possible: an Excel spreadsheetand PowerPoint presentation template.
Four-Way Intersection
A few years ago GM North America's midsize and luxury carunit, or Mid/Lux unit, upgraded from Windows 3.1 to 95. Forthat particular project, the four dashboard criteria weremeasured as follows.
PERFORMANCE TO BUDGET was determined bycomparing the budgeted per-seat cost of the rollout againstthe actual costs, which included charges for the contractorsto physically install the program, the per-seat cost of thesoftware itself and the cost of training. GM North Americahad determined previously that it would be cheaper tomaintain and support Windows 95 than it had been to maintainWindows 3.1, which meant that the cost of the rollout wasexpected to go down each month as the savings realized bythe new installations accrued. This dividend was built intothe budget; therefore, in order to gauge its performance tobudget, the Mid/Lux unit needed to track how many seats weredeployed each month.
PERFORMANCE TO SCHEDULE was determined bycounting the number of seats deployed per month andcomparing that to the rollout schedule established at theproject's inception.
DELIVERY OF BUSINESS RESULTS was gauged inthis case by looking at two variables: if the rollout was ontarget to achieve the anticipated cost savings associatedwith moving to Windows 95, and if the team was migratingusers successfully. The former was measured, as it was inthe performance-to-budget criterion, by counting the savingsgenerated by the number of seats deployed per month. Thelatter-in essence, customer satisfaction-was measured byuser surveys and help desk activity, if printer mappingswere installed correctly, if shared-driver access wasmaintained after the upgrade and if new Windows 95 userswere able to do at minimum everything they had been able todo previously. While user satisfaction is difficult tomeasure quantitatively, Clarke says, planning managers triedto stick to hard-and-fast numbers where possible-a certainnumber of negative responses in the user surveys wouldautomatically require a yellow or red rating, for example.
THE DASHBOARD'S RISK-MITIGATION measureisn't meant to take the place of a full-blown weightedrisk-assessment methodology, which is calculated separatelyfor larger projects. Rather, it serves simply as a way totrack potential hazards to a project, explains Clarke, whowas chief information officer for the Mid/Lux unit at thetime. Project managers identify potential risks at theoutset, establish plans to mitigate those risks, thenmeasure each month how well the risk is beingcontrolled. For the Windows 95 rollout in the Mid/Lux unit,the risk was that the core build of the new OS wouldn't beavailable on time. Parameters were determined by measuringwhether Microsoft was meeting its promised deliverytargets. Of course, risks can and do surface suddenlymidproject. For example, Clarke discovered in the earlymonths of the Windows 95 rollout that the software his teamhad installed wasn't fully Y2K compliant, which meant thatthey had to go back and modify the workstations they hadalready upgraded.
True Colors
Generally a green score overall indicates all four criteriaunderneath are green as well, though there is some latitudein that judgment. Similarly, if there's red anywhere in thedashboard, it's usually red "on top," or overall, as well.
And what happens when a project goes red? Dashboardproponents at GM North America have worked hard to educateproject managers and team members that red doesn't mean"bad," it means "help." "Red means, I need more money ormore people or better business buy-in or a business championor help with a vendor," Clarke explains.
It's not unusual for projects to show a red month or two-andthe dashboard includes a text area where mitigating factorscan be mentioned. But three red months in a row is normallythe outer limit before intervention is necessary, and oncritical projects, a single red can be enough to bring outthe troops.
At one point, the Mid/Lux Windows 95 rollout was redsimultaneously in three different areas: budget, scheduleand risk, Clarke says. The group needed additional funding,additional resources to perform necessary software andhardware upgrades, and additional help with training andmigration from a different group within Information Systems& Services (IS&S).
"Presenting that status in not just one meeting but severalhelped everybody understand the difference between theprogram we planned and the work that was happening on thefront lines," Clarke says. "That red status was a neutralway to communicate that our two groups needed to work moreclosely together."
Frequently, red status triggers a corrective action meetingbetween relevant executives on the project and a CIO fromthe business-unit level or higher up. Mark Thompson,director of planning for GM North America InformationTechnology, recalls one case where a project hit a yellowlight when a supplier wasn't meeting its deliveryschedule. Because the project was considered strategicallycrucial, GM went into immediate alert mode, with thesupplier and other project executives being called into ameeting with the high-ranking CIO for GM NorthAmerica. "That's one meeting everyone aspires never to bein," says Thompson. "It can be very painful. Let's just saythere were some immediate behavior adjustments all the wayaround."
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.
GM North America's IS&S department likes thered-yellow-green dashboard metaphor so much that it uses itto track operations as well. A separate but identicaldashboard reports on network performance, Notesavailability, help desk satisfaction, delivery of new userPCs and IDs, availability of the company's GM onlineIntranet, lost hours of productivity and so on.
"We started with a separate way to do this, but theconclusion we came to is that we can use the dashboardmethod to portray both projects and operations," Clarkesays. "Whether we're sustaining operations or startingsomething new, we still need to send a status message, andwe all understand the meaning of red-yellow-green."