Quantitative Measurement of Successful Performance from the Project Manager’s Perspective

This paper describes a process for converting a project manager’s qualitative evaluation of “successful performance” to a quantitative measurement. In a recent study, randomly selected electrical companies throughout the United States submitted two projects for analysis: (1) one project that was well planned and performed successfully; and (2) one project that was poorly planned and performed less-than-successfully. Overall, 55 projects were evaluated. Success, however, is a subjective concept that often depends on the team member providing the definition. Consequently, during the interview process, project managers were asked to provide their own definition of successful performance, and this definition was matched to the collected data to identify appropriate variables for inclusion in a performance measurement index. A reliability analysis was performed, and six variables were ultimately used to construct the index, including actual percent profit, percent schedule overrun, amount of time given, communication between team members, budget achievement, and change in work hours. A cross-validation technique was used to evaluate the performance measurement index, and a misclassification rate of 2% was observed, which indicated that the model was useful for quantitatively measuring successful performance based on the project managers’ definitions of success.