27 Examples of Project Performance

John Spacey, updated on June 16, 2023

Project performance is how well a project achieves its objectives and goals. This is first and foremost measured in terms of project outcomes that represent the business benefits achieved by the project. Project performance can also be measured in project terms such as how well a project meets its schedule, budget and requirements. The following are the common ways to measure project performance.

Project Performance

The following are important KPIs for measuring how well a project meets its commitments independently of business outcomes.

Schedule Variance	The difference between scheduled and actual progress.
Cost Variance	The difference between budgeted and actual cost.
Earned Value	The budgeted value of work completed at a point in time.
Planned Value	The value of work that was scheduled to be complete at a point in time.
Cost Performance Index	Compares earned value to actual cost.
Schedule Performance Index	Compares earned value to planned value.
Return on Investment	The estimated net profit created by a project divided by its cost. Note here that net profit is influenced by both cost and revenue.
Time to Market	The time the project took from concept to launch or from approval to launch.
Defect Density	The total defects divided by the amount of work delivered such as lines of code.
Stakeholder Satisfaction	Stakeholder satisfaction with the project.

Project Outcomes

A business views a project in terms of business outcomes as opposed to internal metrics of how well the project delivered. This is beyond the control of project managers and is more the responsibility of those who sponsor the project and set its requirements. The following are the basic types of project outcome KPI.

Revenue	Revenue produced by a product, service, feature or function created or updated by the project.
Market Penetration	The market share of a product after launch.
Customer Satisfaction	If a project is intended to improve customer satisfaction, this is an important project outcome metric.
Risk Exposure	How much a project reduced risk exposure for a business.
Adoption Rate	The percentage of users or customers that use a new product, service, feature or function.
Cost Reduction	An estimate of the total cost reduced by implementing the project. This may be projected out for several years and discounted to a present value.
Process Throughput	The amount of output produced by a business process in an hour or month.
Turnaround Time	Improving the time required to fulfill a request.
Capability Rate	The percentage of your business that has some business capability.
Productivity Rate	Increasing the amount of value an employee produces in an hour or month of work.
Resource Efficiency	The value created by a unit of a resource such as the revenue produced per square foot of data center space.
Reliability Rate	The percentage uptime of a resource such as an IT service.
Error Rate	Reductions in error such as the percentage of bills with a calculation error.
Incident Rate	Reductions in the number of incidents that occur such as outages of a service.
Safety	Reducing workplace related injuries and illness.
Compliance Rate	The percentage of your business that is in compliance with a regulation or standard.
Corporate Social Responsibility	Measuring a positive impact on people and planet such as a reduction in packaging waste that’s not reused or recycled.