46 Managing projects as investments: Earned value to business value
It should be critically important to any organization to gather and
track metrics to determine just how well each senior manager is perform-
ing in his or her role as project sponsor.
1. Does one vice president periodically fund new IT systems, promis-
ing that the reductions in headcount and processing time thus gen-
erated will result in $2 million per year in savings, only to have the
new system generate less than 10% of that value?
2. Do a particular sponsor’s project parameters frequently use “low-
ball” estimates, saying, for example, that a project should produce
expected project prot of $5 million over three years provided it is
completed in six months for a $2 mil ...