1.4e – Data-Informed Decision-Making

Project management increasingly uses data and metrics to support better decisions. Sarah learns to move beyond "gut feel" to evidence-based management.

1.4e.1 Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven

• Data-Informed: Use data as a key input, along with context, judgment, and experience.
• Data-Driven: Let data make the decision automatically, often ignoring human factors or context.

Goal: Be data-informed. Use metrics to surface problems, then use your judgment to solve them.

1.4e.2 Common Project Metrics

Schedule Metrics

• Schedule Variance (SV): Are we ahead or behind?
• Schedule Performance Index (SPI): How efficient is our time usage? (>1.0 is good).
• Burn-down/Burn-up Charts: Visual tracking of work completion against a timeline.

Cost Metrics

• Cost Variance (CV): Are we over or under budget?
• Cost Performance Index (CPI): How much value are we getting for every dollar spent? (>1.0 is good).
• Burn Rate: How fast is the budget being consumed?

Quality Metrics

• Defect Rate: Bugs found per unit of work.
• Test Coverage: Percentage of requirements or code verified.
• Cycle Time: How long it takes for a task to go from start to finish.

1.4e.3 Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

• Lagging Indicators: Measure outcomes after the fact (e.g., final cost, items delivered). They tell you what happened but are too late to change.
• Leading Indicators: Predict the future (e.g., team morale, velocity trends, requirements churn). They help you act before a problem becomes a crisis.

1.4e.4 Metric Pitfalls

• Vanity Metrics: Things that look good but don't predict success (e.g., "lines of code").
• Gaming the System: Changing behavior to "hit the number" while hurting the project (e.g., closing bugs without fixing them).
• Ignoring Context: "Velocity is down" might just mean the team took a holiday, not that they are less productive.

1.4e.5 On the Exam: Data Scenarios

Exam questions ask you to interpret a metric and choose an action.

• CPI < 1.0: You are over budget. Action: Improve efficiency or reduce scope.
• SPI < 1.0: You are behind schedule. Action: Analyze the critical path or consider crashing/fast-tracking.
• High Requirements Churn: Scope is unstable. Action: Engage stakeholders to lock requirements or move to an agile approach.

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Trend is Your Friend

A single data point can be an outlier. Always look for trends (3+ data points moving in a direction) before making major project adjustments.