Note: When parking at the Zoo for the dinner meeting on April 29th, we recommend that you park in the south parking lot close to the bridge where parking will still be free of charge. A parking fee is now charged for parking in the north parking lot, a result of recent changes in Zoo parking policy. Visitors arriving by LRT will not be affected.

Member - $30.00 + GST
Non-Member - $35.00 + GST
Student - $20.00 + GST
Volunteer - $0.00 + GST

Collecting and reporting effective project metrics can be a tricky business. Einstein captured it well when he noted “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”.

Software projects have a history of measuring irrelevant and even counter-productive progress tracking metrics. The “Hawthorne Effect” should teach us that we will influence what we measure, yet companies continue to overtly track things like hours worked and lines of code written, unaware that they send the message of valuing long hours over results, and discourage simplifications and healthy refactoring. Quite often the metrics we want to track are intangible and subjective and so people tend to shy away from them.

More fundamentally, why are we even tracking these metrics? Is it to report on what has already occurred or help steer our future course? Often an imperfect view of the future is more useful than a perfect view of the past. In the real world, rear-view mirrors are much smaller than windshields for good reason, yet the accuracy of hind-sight and our attraction to certainty often creates too much of an emphasis on lagging, already occurred measurements compared to leading metrics. So we get fancy graphs of project spend and defect rates, but no better insights into what we should be doing differently in order to meet our goal.

In this presentation Mike will review many common project metrics and explain why they are largely misguided and counter productive. An alternative set of “Design Factory” metrics will be presented that are “simple and relevant to the true project goal”, these metrics leverage the Hawthorne effect and focus on leading metrics to support smarter decision making.

Mike Griffiths

Mike Griffiths is a project manager, consultant and trainer specializing in effective project management. Mike was involved in the creation of the agile method DSDM in 1994 and has been using agile methods (Scrum, FDD, XP and DSDM) for the last 16 years. He is active in both the agile project management community and traditional PMI-based circles. He served on the board of the Agile Alliance, the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and founded the Calgary APLN Chapter. Mike was a contributing reviewer to the PMBOK v3 Guide, is a trainer for the PMI SeminarsWorld program, and is a board member of the PMI-Agile Community of Practice. He maintains the award winning leadership and agile project management blog at www.LeadingAnswers.com.

• 5:00pm - 6:00pm - Networking
• 6:00pm - 7:00pm - Dinner
• 7:00pm - 8:00pm - Dinner and Speaker