BrightWork will be attending and exhibiting at the upcoming Microsoft SharePoint 2011 Conference in California (come visit us at Booth 262). We are really excited about this for two reasons: firstly, we are really looking forward to catching up with our customers, partner and friends in the SharePoint community and secondly, because we have some cool new project management features added to BrightWork that we want to show off!

Perhaps the most exciting upcoming feature is the new BrightWork Project Metrics list. This list will enable you easily to automatically capture and track important project metrics, assign warning and danger indictors to metric values and visualize how the metric has evolved over time. Explaining this feature really requires a dedicated post and I will describe the other features coming in BrightWork 10 in another post.

Project metrics are important because they give you and the other project stakeholders an easy, objective and scientific way of measuring the progress of the project, and also the grounds with which to make important decisions as to the direction and scope of the project.

Generally, the metrics you will want to measure will come under the classic project management mix of: Cost; Quality;  Time; and Scope.

For example:

• Variance from the planned finish date
• Current Budgeted Cost versus Planned Estimated Cost
• Number of Critical Bugs over a threshold
• Number of Critical Tasks currently Overdue
• Number of Change Requests

With a little bit of effort and time, a diligent project manager could look at the available project data and work out their metrics. They might do it on a spread sheet or using pen and paper. If they are using SharePoint to manage projects, then it is likely that all the data needed to calculate the metrics is in SharePoint. The problem is the necessary data could be in a few different locations. Some of it could be in the Project Statement, some could be in a particular list view and some could be in a BrightWork report.

BrightWork now comes with the capability to easily define, capture, track and report on metrics for single projects or for multiple projects in a Project Office. BrightWork templates come pre-loaded with sample metrics to give you a fast start. You can also easily graph the history of each metric by day, week, month, quarter or year. The metrics can be automatically calculated or manually entered.

Automated Data Gathering and Calculation

The new Project Metrics list from BrightWork enables the automatic gathering all  project metric data in a single list. Each metric exists as an item in the list. The data for the metric can be captured from a list (optionally filtered by selecting a specific list view or by adding your own CAML) or from a BrightWork Report. The metric list gathers the data and does any calculations required to establish the metric value.

Target, Warning and Danger Icons

You can assign Target, Warning and Danger icons to value ranges in the metric, meaning you can have an instant warning of when the project is getting into trouble.

Metric History Chart

The Project Metrics list also includes a history chart that shows you how the metric value has changed (or not changed) over time.

BrightWork Reporter Integration

Metric values and icons can also be included in Project reports – enabling you to easily visualize the health of multiple projects according to an agreed standard. Previously, project managers had to manually maintain the project progress indicators (e.g. Health, Time, Cost and Quality). The Project Metrics list now does all the data-gathering and calculation!