PSI CONTRIBUTION

Step 1 contributes 20 towards the PSI. You can think of the score out of 20 as being a measure of how completely well-defined or otherwise the goal of the project is. At the beginning, when the project goal is only a vague idea in people's heads, the score out of 20 will be close to, or at, 0. The score only reaches 20 on the day the project ends. Only then will you know exactly what the goal of the project turned out to be.

The Step 1 score will vary within the range 0 “20 over the life of the project. Thus, for example, suppose your project life cycle had a number of phases in it, say:

• Requirements gathering

• Design

• Implementation

• Integration

• Testing

• Release

then the PSI would gradually increase as you completed each of these phases. If you think of the score as a measure of how well-defined the goal of the project has become as a result of each phase, then you might assign values to these six phases as follows :

Requirements gathering	4
Design	9
Implementation	14
Integration	17
Testing	19
Release	20

To use the PSI for your own projects, you should do a similar exercise in which you map the 20 points available onto the phases of your own project life cycle. Remember, the way to do it is to analyze how much more well-defined the goal of the project has become as a result of each phase.

An alternative way would be to break the goal of the project down into blocks and allocate a maximum score per block, the sum of the maximum scores adding up to 20.

STRUCTURED PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Planning the project

1. VISUALIZE WHAT THE GOAL IS; SET YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE