Suggestions for Improving Measurement Plans: A BMP application in Spain

Time and Cost are most often in industry the two main (often solely) dimensions of analysis against which a project is monitored and controlled, excluding other possible dimensions such as Quality, Risks, impact on society and Stakeholders’ viewpoints in a broader sense. Another issue of interest is the proper amount of measures and indicators to implement in an organization to optimizing the two sides of the cost of quality (COQ cost of quality and CONQ cost of non quality). How can multiple concurrent control mechanisms across several dimensions of analysis be balanced? The approach of Balancing Multiple Perspectives (BMP) has been designed to help project managers choose a set of project indicators from several concurrent viewpoints. After gathering experiences from Canada, Germany and Turkey, this paper presents the results from a new BMP application in Spain, using a list of 14 candidate measures interviewing a double set of respondents from industry. Lessons learned are presented for improving measurement plans.