Don’t do anything else on your project until you’ve done this!
14 April 2009
If you’ve ever watched TV hospital dramas like ER, then you’ll know the scene when the crash cart comes through the door and the A&E doctor checks for the patient’s ‘vital signs’. The vital signs are the handful of things which tell the doctor the key things they need to know about the patient.
Just as people have vital signs, projects have vital signs. There are a handful of things which, the presence or absence of them, will tell you how your project is doing.
ETP’s PSI (Probability of Success Indicator) checks for these vital signs. If you haven’t yet run a PSI over your project, you should.
ETP’s Project Management Guide #8, How To Assess A Project In Five Minutes, describes how to check for a project’s vital signs and calculate its PSI.
The PSI comes in three forms – Simple, Intermediate and Advanced:
o Simple – checks for a project’s vital signs
o Intermediate – gives you additional diagnostic information about the project
o Advanced – for a full-scale audit or review of a project (particularly useful if a project has gone off the rails)
All three forms of the PSI are described in ETP’s Project Management Guide #18, The Probability of Success Indicator.
