I'm speaking and attending the EVM World 2009 conference in Florida. This is a gathering of 500 or so Earned Value and Cost Estimating specialist discussing the theory and practice of Earned Value in a variety of domains. These domains are dominated by Department of Defense and large construction.
There is not an IT manager within a 1,000 miles. Even though SOX, CobiT, and ITIL all call for "performance measurement" of projects.
While listening to speakers - some from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), who buys and builds billions of dollars of software - some from other enterprises - it's clear that the core failure cause of IT projects starts with the following:
- No description of the product being built - No WBS
- No predefination of expected performance of the project team - No Performance Measurment Baseline
- No predefined units of measure of success - No meaningful measures for the customer to discover if progress is being made
One of the core principles of agile software development is the production of working software. This is a measure of physical percent complete - If and Only If (IIF) there is an understanding of what "done" looks like.
In the absence of this information - physical percent complete and the Estimate At Complete - the project becomes a death march at worse and a "level of effort" at best.
