The KPIs You Should Be Tracking As a Project Management Consultant
“It’s all about the money…” That's how the song goes. But in the world of project management consultants, it’s all about the metrics. Without the right metrics there is no way to really measure your success. There are a number of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for project management (probably more than people realise). Essentially, all these KPIs can be divided into 4 categories:
- Budget
- Effectiveness
- Timelines
- Quality
Project Management KPIs Examples
To ensure that you can keep track of your project management successes, here are some of the most important project management KPIs examples:
Budget KPIs
Veering off the budget path
It’s not strange to see changes to the budget throughout the duration of a project. But, it’s important to keep track of how often the budget changes and why. You will need to measure all baseline expenses along with expected values.
Lining up the line items
This helps to keep a more detailed overview of the project budget and helps project managers to keep a track of individual expenses.
Calculate the planned value
Planned value is the outstanding total when looking at the pending tasks. This planned value will help you to adjust the budget more accurately and complete the project effectively.
Calculate the budget creation cycle time
This is how long it will take to create an effective budget for the business/company. It’s important to note though, that this cycle time spans all the way from conception and research to the final agreement.
Keep track of the cost performance index
This helps to compare the budget to the actual amount of money spent. This, of course, relates to individual tasks and expenses as well as the overall budget and project. It will measure the expense efficiency of the project.
Effectiveness KPIs
Keep track of the project milestones
Another important project management KPI that project management consultants need to keep a track of is project milestones. It is the number of completed milestones according to the expected and planned deadlines.
Establish the groundwork needed
Some projects may require team members to be upskilled. So, these team members might need to go on courses or receive training. The project might also require additional research.
Keep track of billable hours
This is otherwise known as billable utilization and is one of the most crucial KPIs for project management. It essentially means that you need to consistently calculate what percentage of the total hours allocated to the project ends up being billable hours.
Stay on top of edits
Whether a business/company offers a service or sells a product, there will always be requests for amendments and changes. You need to keep a track of how many of these changes are requested during a project. Not only might this allude to internal communication or skill issues, but it might also make you aware of scope creep from certain clients. Scope creep is one of the biggest reasons why projects are not completed on time and the business/company is bleeding money due to non billable hours.
Timeline KPIs
Determine the cycle time
You need to calculate the time it takes to complete each of the task that forms a part of the project.
Calculate time spent
This is the accumulative time that team members as well as project managers spent on the project. In order to calculate this, we need the time spent by each individual on the project which is also very helpful information to have.
Convert time spent into workdays
There is something to be said for relatability. Most of us will struggle to grasp a set number of hours. We’ll either feel that it’s too few or too much for our minds to actually grasp what that means. People will understand and relate better to someone explaining that they’ve lost an entire work week due to an unnecessary mistake than mentioning 40 hours.
Do the resource capacity math
This is another one of the project management KPIs that is absolutely crucial to any project and project management consultants. Although it might sound complicated, it’s a very simple formula. Resource Capacity = Number of individuals working on the project X % of time available in their schedules to work on the project.
Calculate the on-time percentage
You will need to keep a track of all the tasks that are successfully completed within the allotted time. You need to calculate the overall on-time completion percentage of the project.
Keep track of schedule changes
With any project a certain amount of schedule adjustments can be expected, but at some point too many changes or constant changes to the structure of the project can be detrimental to the success of the project.
Quality KPIs
Measure customer satisfaction
Whether a product or service, you’ll need to evaluate how satisfied customers were. This can be measured in terms of customer testimonials as well as brand loyalty in regards to returning customers. Most project management consultants make use of past customer experiences that were noted as well as surveys in order to establish a clear picture of customer satisfaction.
Make note of all the errors
This relates to the number of times team members had to redo or rewrite something in terms of a specific project. When it comes to KPIs for project management, this is an important one since this can have a big impact on budget.
To read up on all the KPIs that can be used to measure a project success is legion. We have merely highlighted some of the most important project management KPIs examples. For more comprehensive KPIs for project management you’ll probably need to grab a copy of one of Harold Kerzner, Ph,D’s books such as Project Management 2.0: Leveraging Tools, Distributed Collaboration, and Metrics or Project Management Metrics, KPIs, and Dashboards: A Guide to Measuring and Monitoring Project Performance. Alternatively, keep an eye out on our latest courses here.
