Project Health Indicator (PHI) Tool: Assessing Project Health during Project Execution

The research identified 43 Leading Indicators, some of which are provided below: (IR220-2, p. 3, Table 1)

1. The project team is lacking in the necessary expertise, experience, breadth, and depth to successfully execute the project.
2. The project team is experiencing a high turnover rate and instability in team membership.
3. The project team’s response to Requests for Information, questions, and changing events that can significantly impact the project results is slow, inadequate, or incomplete.
4. The project team is losing confidence in the accuracy and validity of the schedule.
5. Project milestones are not being met and are consequently jeopardizing future project milestones.
6. Construction is awarded before adequate completion of project design, including discipline design packages, resulting in an incomplete scope definition at time of award/start of construction.
7. Business goals, project objectives and priorities, and critical success factors are not being consistently used by project team members and key stakeholders to guide decisions.
8. Owner and/or contractor are requesting an excessive number of contract changes and/or scope changes during project execution (detailed design, procurement, construction, and startup).
9. Significant project scope items are inadvertently omitted from bid packages.
10. Some project participant companies become financially unstable.

Each of the 43 Leading Indicators has a sheet that more fully describes the indicator and gives considerations for measurement. An example for Leading Indicator 18 is shown below.

From the surveys, RT-220 was able to statistically determine which Leading Indicators (LI) had the greatest impact on each of the five key project outcomes:

• Cost
• Schedule
• Quality/operability
• Safety
• Stakeholder satisfaction

IR220-2, Project Health Indicator Tool

The PHI is an Excel spreadsheet based tool and contains two outputs. The first output is the score that reflects the risk related to project outcomes, or a measure of project health. The second output is the correlation to project practices to help identify areas that should be improved to lower the risk of undesirable outcomes. The PHI tool is intended as a complement to traditional project controls and as an early warning system to identify problems earlier tan by traditional methods.