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Abstract
The performance of project delivery in the software development domain has a poor history of successes. This research focused on identifying some of the reasons for this poor performance for software development projects in order to propose a possible framework for measuring and evaluating a software development project's performance. The proposed framework is intended to link individual project performance into the strategic performance measurements for an organisation and hence includes the aspect of being able to evaluate an individual project's performance relative to other projects within a programme, organisation or industry.
The research was conducted through in-depth interviews and literature studies. The following three Key findings resulted from this study:
• Firstly that unless an organisation establishes upfront what the intended use of the measurements is, as well as how they as an organisation and project define "project success" in terms of their overall objectives, any measurements taken will be oflittle value.
• Secondly that there is still strong support for the generic measurements of Time, Cost, and Quality all within good customer relations, however, these need to take into account the aspects of project complexity, project management skills, the team fit and the accuracy of the estimates.
• Thirdly that the ultimate framework adopted by an organisation for measuring and evaluating project performance should be simple without being simplistic and hence should be generic and easy to implement across a broad range of projects.
