PM 340 Week 3 Measures and Baselines Example

What Counts Before Opening Day: Setting Baselines and Choosing Measures for a Museum Gallery Project

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/340: Project Delivery and Measurement

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Prairie River Museum of Natural History, its baselines, measures and targets are composites written for a model paper.

Omaha's imagined Prairie River Museum of Natural History is four months from opening its 9,000-square-foot Pleistocene mammal hall on the Saturday before spring break. Weeks 1 and 2 covered how the work is done and how scope and quality are delivered. This paper asks how the team will know, week by week, whether it is on track, and how the museum will know, a year after opening, whether the gallery delivered what donors paid for.

Why Measurement Is a Domain

The current standard describes the measurement performance domain as the work of assessing project performance and taking appropriate action to keep it on track, and it notes that measures should be chosen for their usefulness in decisions (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2021). Measurement serves three purposes here: it tells the project manager where to intervene, it tells the sponsor and donors how the project is doing and it builds a record that the museum can use to plan its next two galleries.

The Baselines

A baseline is the approved version of a plan, used as the reference for measuring progress. The museum has three.

The scope baseline is the approved design, every case, wall, mount, light, graphic panel and interactive station in the drawings and the media list, each with acceptance criteria from Week 2. The schedule baseline covers 62 weeks from design approval to opening, with milestones for fabrication release, first case delivery, specimen installation start, media installation and the members' soft opening. The cost baseline is $3.42 million, including $300,000 in contingency for identified risks. A management reserve of $380,000 sits outside the baseline under the director's control, bringing the total budget to $3.8 million.

Cooke-Davies (2002) examined data from a large set of projects in many organizations and identified factors associated with on-time and on-budget delivery; one of them was keeping the integrity of the performance measurement baseline. The museum protects its baselines by changing them only through the approval process described in Week 1 and by recording every change with its reason, so that performance is always compared with an honest reference.

Leading and Lagging Indicators

Lagging indicators report results after they happen: cases installed, money spent. They are essential but arrive too late to change the outcome they report. Leading indicators move before results do and give the team time to act. Drawing approval time is a leading indicator for fabrication; if it rises, case deliveries will slip weeks later. Shop inspection defects predict installation problems. The museum tracks both kinds, and it reads them together: a rise in drawing approval time in October should show up as a dip in cases installed in December, and if it does not, the team learns that its leading measure is weaker than it thought.

A lagging measure tells the team what happened; a leading measure tells it what is about to happen while there is still time.

The Eight Measures

Each measure has a target, a source, a frequency and an owner:

Shop drawing approval time (leading): target five working days or fewer; source, the approval log; weekly; project manager.

Defects per case at shop inspection (leading): target fewer than two minor defects and no major ones; source, inspection checklists; every three weeks; deputy project manager.

Cases installed against plan (lagging): target 100 percent of the weekly plan; source, the status wall chart; weekly; installation lead.

Schedule performance at milestones (lagging): each milestone met within five working days; source, the schedule; biweekly; project manager.

Cost performance (lagging): spending within 3 percent of planned value at each monthly review; source, finance reports; monthly; finance analyst.

Requirements accepted (lagging): all requirements accepted by their owners before the soft opening; source, the acceptance log; weekly in the final month; registrar and curators.

Interactive test success (leading): at least 8 of 10 test visitors succeed without help; source, test records; each test round; education director.

Donor confidence (leading): no major donor raises a concern not already addressed; source, development office notes; monthly; development director.

Measuring Value After Opening

The project's business case promised more visitors, more members and a gallery visitors would linger in. The museum will measure value over the first year: total attendance at least 12 percent above the three-year average, 600 new memberships in the year, average time spent in the gallery of at least 14 minutes, measured by observing a sample of visitors on set days, and visitor ratings of at least 4.3 out of 5. These measures belong to the education and membership departments after handover, but their baselines are recorded now so that comparison is possible.

When Measurement Misleads

Ridgway (1956) warned that performance measures can produce dysfunctional behavior, because people work to improve the number rather than the result it is meant to represent. Three traps apply here. First, gaming: if the installation lead is judged only on cases installed, cases may be installed before their logger data are complete. The museum pairs the count with the requirements-accepted measure so that speed cannot hide quality problems. Second, too many metrics: early drafts of the plan had 23 measures, and the team cut them to eight that each trigger a decision. Third, drifting baselines: if the schedule is quietly re-planned each time a delivery slips, schedule performance will always look good. All baseline changes go through change control and are reported to the sponsor.

Reporting

The project manager presents the eight measures on a one-page dashboard at the biweekly sponsor meeting, and writes one line beside any measure that has missed its mark: what went wrong and who is fixing it by when. Measures that stay green for a month get no commentary at all, which keeps the meeting on the problems. The development office receives a simpler monthly version for donors.

Conclusion

The museum's measurement plan rests on three protected baselines and eight measures that mix early warnings with results, each with a target, source and owner. It looks past opening day to the value donors expect and recognizes that measures can distort behavior if chosen carelessly. With four months to go, the plan gives the team enough warning to act before a slipping drawing review becomes a missing case on opening day.

References

Cooke-Davies, T. (2002). The "real" success factors on projects. International Journal of Project Management, 20(3), 185-190. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(01)00067-9

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.

Ridgway, V. F. (1956). Dysfunctional consequences of performance measurements. Administrative Science Quarterly, 1(2), 240-247. https://doi.org/10.2307/2390989