Comparison and evaluation - "Which is better?"

Project management is all about making sure we have better projects. Sometimes a better project is one that delivers what is needed on time and on budget. (Or earlier and cheaper.) Sometimes the only thing that could make a project better is to stop it, so the business doesn’t waste any more money on something it doesn’t need, or already has.

But that’s all project management is about – better projects.

It may be you’d like to introduce new technology into your projects. Or perhaps you have some new management techniques you want to use instead of the old ones. That’s fine – if they produce better projects.

When you use these new things, do they make your projects better? Yes, this is hard to measure over individual projects – after all, each project is different. But over time, groups of projects will have enough similarities to be compared with other groups of projects. So measure to see if your projects are better – quicker, cheaper, or higher quality. (Though quality that goes beyond your specs may not necessarily make a project better.)

All of this takes work, and time. It takes work to deliver projects in your new way. It takes time to build up enough to be able to compare them to other projects – either your own from the past, or other people’s who aren’t using these new things. And it takes both work and time to analyse these results. But that’s the only way you can tell if you new thing is letting you deliver better projects.

And that’s all we’re here to do.

(Image courtesy of WhiteAfrican. Some rights reserved.)