In my last post I listed the 5 most important (in my humble opinion) “hidden” factors which are likely to cause project failure. I suspect it’s an unusual list and I also suspect number 5 on that list is one of the most misunderstood.

Misunderstood because no project manager is ever going to say they have no metrics. Project managers always have metrics. Many many metrics. So I hear you saying “what’s the problem, my PM’s have loads of metrics, they report on them endlessly”.

Well, the point is that many exclude those that are most important and include metrics which mislead.

Consider this reasonable sounding list of metrics:

1. Business processes to be replaced
2. Function points to support those business processes
3. Cost of implementing each function point
4. Dependencies between the functions and the business processes

Well, they look super don’t they? No.

This list ignores measures of what’s really driving cost and productivity – useful code written and the “power” of that code. A business process could require 10 lines or 1 million lines of code, likewise a function point. So you have 1000 business processes? Great, but these metrics offer no information on how much work is required.

Key to modern software production is to carefully structure and construct such that a single software module can be used in many different business processes and many different function. It’s no coincidence that modern programming languages like Rust or Swift have focused on providing tools to generalize code writing, for example “generic functions” and extendable types.

In a future posting (don’t worry, it’ll be quite soon) I’ll delve into some metrics which more accurately measure project cost, progress and value.