Five Core Metrics: The Intelligence Behind Successful Software Management

Part IV: Control at the Organization Level

Life is lived so intensely by hard-pressed staff members inside the cocoon of a faltering software project that they easily forget the realm beyond the project. But we must not forget. The software world is huge and much of it reflects back on the progress of the individual project. To examine that world in this concluding Part, we follow the practice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, wife of the English nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning, who once said, though in a lovelier setting, “Let us count the ways.”

1. An organization acquiring software under contract from suppliers can evaluate contractor capability, validate bids against the core metrics, and even encourage contractors by measuring their ...