Читать книгу Project Management For Dummies - Stanley E. Portny - Страница 20

Your project’s success is ultimately measured, quantitatively or qualitatively, by your stakeholders’ perceived value — worth, importance, or utility — of the outcome they receive, during or after the project. If you’re fortunate enough to manage a project driven by a business case (many are, but not all) that lays out the business need, project justification, and strategy to realize the benefits of the intended outcomes, you have the baseline you need to inform your project decisions and against which you’ll assess your project’s value. Value is a subjective term, so the more assured you are of your baseline, the more confident you’ll be in your assertion of the value provided by your project. If you are managing a project without a clearly defined business case, then work with your relevant stakeholders to document the business need, project justification, and business strategy. Use those learnings to inform your project decisions and guide your team.

Like value, quality may initially seem like a subjective term. It does not need to be. With clearly defined objectives and intended outcomes, well-thought-out test cases and test scripts (or whatever instrument is most fitting to evaluate your project’s quality), quality can be objectively assessed by how many scripts passed or failed during testing. This methodology is well-suited for software development projects, for example; however, not all projects can be evaluated in such an objective manner. If this is true for your project, devote time early on with your stakeholders to devise a mechanism for evaluating project success in a quantifiable and measurable way. This upfront effort will pay dividends when you consider what worked well and what could be improved the next time you undertake a similar project.

Once your project’s requirements are well-defined and finalized, consider developing a traceability matrix (also called a requirements traceability matrix) to associate every individual test script to a test case and ultimately to a project requirement. Test scripts and test cases are commonly used in software development projects, but they may not be applicable to your project. That’s no problem! Substitute the artifacts and tools that are most relevant to your project type and you’ll be good to go. The purpose of the traceability matrix is two-fold: first, it helps to ensure that every requirement is addressed by your product and that every requirement is sufficiently tested; and second, it forces you to justify each test script to ensure your team’s effort is relevant and helps to achieve an intended outcome.