When does a project need recovery? If you wait for a threshold like TSPI’s 1.10 to be breached, it’s too late. If indicators are noodling along, not too great, not too horrible, it might be too early. Raising the alarm would hurt your credibility.
To decide, you need more information. More than that, you need the right information.
Earned Schedule fills in the gap.
How so?
Let’s answer the question through an example.
Say that at the half-way point on a 12 month project, the Schedule Performance Index for time looks like this:
Sure, the project got off to a slow start, but it improved significantly, and the SPIt is still climbing!
How does the Estimate at Complete for time look?
Given that the Planned Duration is 10 months, the estimates are not too bad, but they’re not great, either. The bounds are converging, but the nominal seems to be stuck at slightly more than the plan.
Maybe, the project is not in big trouble, and there’s no justification for initiating recovery.
What does the To Complete Schedule Performance Index tell us?
The late start and nil SPIt throw off the first measurement. The other measurements seem to be hovering below the 1.10 threshold. Again, there’s no clear signal to start recovery.
So, what do you do?
Don’t ignore the situation and hope for the best. Don’t flip a coin. Get more information.
Another measurement from Earned Schedule helps: the window of opportunity.
Based on current performance, the window of opportunity for recovery is .132.
To put that into perspective, if all the remaining time were available, the window would be 1.000. If no remaining time were available, it would be 0.000. So, it’s possible, but the window looks small.
You might think, “Wait, the project is only 60% complete. Surely, recovery is possible with a full four months to go!”
Dream on.
Walt Lipke’s research has shown that once the TSPI hits 1.10, recovery is very unlikely. The math behind the window of opportunity is tied directly to that break point. The window measures the time available before the threshold is breached.
So, it’s not four months of runway. It’s less than 15% of the remaining timeline, or about 17 days. Not four months; instead, about one month. At the current level of performance, the project will be unrecoverable in a month.
The percentage is informative, but a picture is better.
With just a month to recover, it would be prudent to take action now. But, it’s possible that you might still hold off the decision. Recovery is a dramatic step, and a window remains open.
Fortunately, there’s other information that helps us decide: the Improvement Profile, for one. (See the dotted line and four rightmost columns in the table). The Profile identifies the efficiencies required in each period of the Window.
Look at the required efficiencies and see if the project achieved similar efficiencies in the past. Also, you can check whether or not the required rate of change is similar to the rate achieved earlier in the project.
The answers tell you whether recovery is realistic for your project. If so, there is good reason to start down the road to recovery.
In the graph, the previous efficiencies are followed by the recovery efficiencies.
The recovery efficiencies are striking. Almost all of them exceed the maximum efficiency attained thus far.
Furthermore, after a sharp initial increase, previous efficiency leveled off--well below the needed level.
That’s more reason to start recovery.
And, yet, it might be argued that the desired recovery rate appears to be lower than the rate achieved through the first three periods. That’s based on the slope of the first increase versus that of the second.
It might be that the project is capable of attaining a rate as high as the one required.
That’s a thin thread, but it’s a reason to hold the decision in abeyance.
That is, until next month. Then, a final recovery metric will conclude the story.
Similar to other recovery metrics, the Improvement Profile has Pros and Cons. Here they are:
Pro:
- Quantitative metrics resist cognitive bias and strategic misrepresentation.
- The improvement profile is mathematically based on TSPI, inheriting its theoretical and empirical support.
- The improvement profile can be assessed against previous performance.
Con:
- The comparison with previous performance is intuitive. Subjectivity creeps back into the metric. |
