Page 340 - Global Project Management Handbook

SUCCESS FACTORS IN VIRTUAL GLOBAL SOFTWARE PROJECTS 16-27

CSF23: Define and Use Customer Impact Metrics. Successful VGS projects also
feature customer impact metrics that can be measured after the product is shipped and
the customer starts to use the product. Says an executive: “We not only need to be
successful but also demonstrably successful.” Unless there are metrics that quantify
the impact of the product on the customer, the perceptions will be subjective and will
fail to reflect the actual success. Customer impact metrics generally are harder to
define. Return on investment (ROI) is the best known of these metrics. However,
improvements generally result from a number of different reasons, and it may be hard
to define ROI metrics. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate objective in all projects,
VGS included. Impact metrics that can proxy customer satisfaction should be a part of
the metrics used. In the words of an executive: “I call the key customers every now
and then and do informal surveys.” Customer satisfaction survey results not only can
indicate where the product stands, but they also can provide ideas as to how to
improve the product. These surveys can be informal as per the executive or can be
more formalized. Other metrics can be based on interviews with customers, with the
number of ideas, thoughts, and problems conveyed regarding the product considered.
In the context of VGS, especially when several consecutive releases of a software
product are developed, customer impact metrics can provide valuable information to the
team for identifying the most influential features and prioritizing tasks. Some of example
metrics include reported problems, comparison of different releases by the customer,
trend in the number of problems that require team intervention, and the cost of handling
customer-reported problems.
CSF24: Define and Use Future Preparation Metrics. Successful VGS projects tend
to include future preparation metrics. These are key to gauging how well the project serves
as a vehicle to carry the organization forward and prepare it for future assignments. Also,
for the project team, they can serve as a way to gain executive buy-in to committing
resources to the project.
Note that some metrics in this group are quantitative, whereas others are more qualita-
tive. Says one executive about the quantitative ones: “I look at key results. Do we execute
against them? What percentage of the planned features did we achieve? How many
releases do we do? How many people per release? How many dollars per release? And
for every release, is it going out, is it going through our whole process, the release cycle,
in less than 10 days?” Another key metric is rather qualitative: the lessons learned from a

project that help to solve problems in other projects.

CONCLUSION

Software development is a big business and a major driving force of growth across indus-
tries. Several factors contribute to software development’s unique nature—technological
novelty, product visibility, speed to market, changeability, and risk level—and the com-
plexity of its management. These factors and the new ones make management of VGS
projects, an increasingly important new mode of software development for companies in
a global environment, even more complex. VGS development includes the endeavor
where the development teams across multiple countries collaborate and perform a vari-
ety of tasks, such as planning, controlling, coding, testing, implementing, and maintain-
ing, to develop new software and achieve common project goals. The new factors are
characteristics of VGS projects, including the distance, time separation, language and
cultural differences, and multiple sites. They tend to reduce coordination efficiency and
effectiveness, control, and performance in VGS projects.