Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success

Chapter 13. Manage the Hot Costs

Six Sigma is a process improvement discipline that’s been used by such companies as Motorola, GTE, and Ford Motors to streamline efficiencies and control costs. The program focuses on measuring performance and then using those measures as a basis for process refinement. Six Sigma calls this "data-driven decision making." The PMI’s PMBOK, another improvement framework, places a similar emphasis on project management’s use of performance and progress data as a way to shape future activity. These data-driven approaches to project management add an extra layer of rigor to the discipline, yet many shops forgo them. Instead, they rely on qualitative management to see them through, whereby experience, intuition, and judgment ...