In companies where the quality of project management execution is assessed at all, it is usually measured against meeting budget, timing, and resource objectives that were often ill-conceived to start with. So when projects go over budget or are under resourced or when timelines are missed, it is too often blamed on “execution,” and rarely on the poor quality of the initial budget, timing, resource, and risk assessments (or lack thereof).

How often have you seen managers record a quantitative basis for their planning estimates at the beginning of a project and then assess them at the end of a project?

Too often managers look at Gantt charts as if they are THE PROJECT PLAN carved in stone. They aren’t. Most of the time, Gantt charts represent the best guesses of well-intentioned people who tend to underestimate risks, resources, and timing (because that is what human beings tend to do). Most of the time, the “data” used to support the project planning either doesn’t exist, hasn’t been checked, or hasn’t been derived empirically. Task start and end dates are fixed with virtually no meaningful or quantitative discussion about the probabilities of meeting those dates or modeling the dramatic cumulative effects of small amounts of slippage on project value.

So it is no wonder that the 2009 project management benchmark survey CHAOS report from The Standish Group showed that  ”44% of projects were “late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions” and only 32% of all projects were delivered on time, on budget, and with the required features and functions.

A big contributor to those results may not be just poor project execution, but how and where the project finish lines were drawn at the start of the project. So it is past the time for managers to be measuring the quality of project execution based on chiseled-in-stone Gantt charts.

Instead, today’s managers need to start using quantitative risk analyses, databases of empirical data from previous experiences, and statistical tools for probabilistic project planning so they can truly assess and improve the quality of project execution.