5.02.2012

BIM and XPM: A Made Marriage - Part 4

So far in the previous parts One, Two and Three of this series I've introduced you to an alternative work management method using eXtreme Project Management theory (XPM). XPM is a variant of the Agile light-weight management movement. The roots of this management theory caught hold in the software world and has moved into other business domains. If you want to change your management to fit more closely with collaborative efforts and use BIM in your practice, then you need to give XPM a very close look. It has a lot of advantages to offer and gives a lot more control to the people actually doing the
work. It energizes, empowers and rejuvenates studios and entire businesses. You will probably find your work environment is a lot happier, people work more efficiently, you meet your deadlines more often and you end up making more money in the process. All with less top-down effort.

So enough soap boxing and on to the practical stuff. This week's installment in this series I promised to let you in on the metrics we measured. So here goes.

Iteration Daily Velocity / Effort
The first and most important measure is the daily burn rate or Velocity expressed in story points. You may remember story points are a measure of both effort and difficulty, not just man hours. The normal strategy is to work on the items which produce the greatest amount of story points first during the week so the graph for each day of the iteration goes from the highest points being early on and being reduced later on. Actually the graph normally has a little bit of a bell shape with the apex in the earlier part of the iteration. That's due to the difficulty of work and effort required to complete the work.


The other metric is the Daily Effort. It is a straightforward summation of the hours worked by the team each day. Just about every tracking method checks this but there is a ratio of the story point Velocity vs. Daily Effort which we called the Daily work value. So we get three metrics which are averaged over the week and then for each iteration and finally for the entire project.

As you can see the metrics we kept are simple and come from just a few data points. It makes it easy to keep the key indicators and the overhead to do this is very low. A simple spreadsheet tallies the daily values and all that is needed is to print off the two graphs for each project team. We kept these metrics for every day and published them on a central board for everyone to see, not just the project team. The competition of teams with each other raised the morale as well. Every team established a goal that worked with the project requirements. Over time the office settled into a comfortable and efficient benchmark that worked well and avoided overtime most of the time.

There is another detail level of this work that directly implements with BIM production, sales and marketing as well as Contract Administration, but the level of detail for those elements is beyond the scope of a blog. This is the last of this series on how I've used XPM in a practice and the general implementation. If you would like to implement XPM in your office and you have questions, feel free to contact me.

This post is a continuation of a String connecting practice, Project management and XPM.




This article continues a String of Connections between practice management, BIM and Agile management practices.  

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