Project assurance expert Pelicam warns of the pitfalls of poor measurement in IT projects and calls for higher industry standards. The company outlines nine key points for effective IT measurement.
It’s one of the oldest adages in management: ‘What gets measured gets done’. Yet examples of the unintended consequences of measurement systems continue to abound, and IT is one of the worst culprits.
For example, a common key measurement is IT spend in comparison to income. How is this to be interpreted? A high ratio might equally indicate a company investing in systems to support future growth - or poor cost control.
What ought to be measured, in addition to IT expenditure, is the value IT delivers to the organisation - that is, the output as well as the input. Good CIOs understand this, but not everybody in IT behaves in a way that recognises it. Some take pride in having ‘the latest’ of everything in their infrastructure, regardless of whether the business actually needs it (and so do some of their end users - witness the competition to see who has got the latest Blackberry model).
Another example of poor measurement in IT is the Service Level Agreement. Too often SLAs are based on what’s easy to measure, such as percentage availability time on a network, rather than what’s important to the user - such as how often, in critical periods, was the application unavailable; or what was the cost to the business of unavailability?
Peek behind the curtain at:
http://journyx.com/rss/redir/projmag-measure.html