Summary: Play Now: Preparing for your Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam? Try PMP certification training on your phone, tablet or PC: Denise McRoberts and Cornelius Fichtner Setting up a PMO usually means setting up some Project Management KPI (Key Performance Metric). But which? This interview about PMO metrics with Denise McRoberts was recorded at the PMI® Global Congress 2016 in San Diego, California. We discuss her paper and presentation "Meaningful Metrics -- The Path toward Measuring what Matters". Here is the abstract: "The project management office (PMO) was in a rut. The number of projects in work at any one time was increasing; project managers were routinely reporting that all was well while schedules slipped, and there was limited understanding of true project costs." Does this sound all too familiar? In this session, attendees will learn some innovative methods to implement metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to better understand your organizational weaknesses and how to overcome them. This session will provide a case study on how a PMO did just that, with plenty of practical examples You will learn what makes a 'good' metric, how metrics should be developed, and that we also need specific project metrics and project portfolio metrics. Click to download the white paper Click to download the handout with metric samples Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner: Welcome back everyone. You are listening to the Project Management Podcast™ at www.PM-podcast.com and we are coming to you live from the sunny town of San Diego in Southern California where we are at the 2016 PMI Global Congress and with me right here at the end of the day is Denise McRoberts. Podcast Interview Cornelius Fichtner: Hello, Denise Denise McRoberts: Hi, Cornelius. How are you? Cornelius: I am very well but the more important question is, how are you, you’ve just literally walked out of your presentation. Denise: I did. I’m doing great. I think it went excellent. I had a great crowd. They actually had to switch the rooms around because there was a lot of pre-registration so we had a full house and it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of good questions at the end as well. Cornelius: Excellent. That’s always what you want to hear. The topic of your presentation is Meaningful Metrics, the Path towards Measuring What Matters. What prompted you to want to speak and write about metrics? Denise: That’s a really good question. There’s a lot of different paths towards what prompted me to speak. The first one really was earlier this year, I was leaving for lunch, I work in Rockwell, Texas and one of the frequent—my favorite fast-food joint because I really like their spicy chicken sandwich and I was sitting in line in the drive-thru and noticed that they had a new sign out front of the drive-thru. That sign said: “It was our pleasure to move 150 cars in our drive-thru yesterday from noon to 1 PM. And I thought man, that’s a really interesting performance metric that they’ve chosen to display here in the drive-thru. As I was sitting there I had a lot of time to think about that metric and assess whether I thought it was good or not. During this whole process, I really visited this fast food chain frequently and looked at their performance numbers over time and started asking questions from the people that were operating the drive-thru about their metrics and I just started thinking about what makes a good metrics, or what makes a good metric and I started relating to that to our organization knowing that we had a whole lot of metrics that we’re measuring and wanted to figure out and make sure that we really had the right metrics and why. So I started
