Using Metrics to Analyze Projects

Acumen Fuse uses libraries of metrics to analyze projects. Standard metric libraries pertaining to schedule quality, cost, project performance, risk exposure, earned value, and more are included within the tool.

Additional libraries and associated metrics can be created.

Metrics contain formulas and tripwire thresholds.

• Formulas are used to calculate results as part of an analysis.
• Tripwire thresholds are used to flag and filter activities that exceed given thresholds.

Metric results can be numeric (for example, cost or duration) or percentages (for example, percentage of total project duration). Percentages are useful for portraying results within a given context.

Metric formulas are defined using standard MS Excel-based formula syntax.

Acumen Fuse includes various metrics libraries including, but not limited to:

• DCMA 14-Point Schedule Assessment(schedule critique)

• Schedule (schedule characteristics)
• Cost (cost characteristics)
• Performance (execution performance relative to a given baseline)
• Plan characteristics (nature and complexity of a project plan)
• Risk exposure (cost and schedule risk exposure)
• Earned Value (EV-based performance analysis)
• Earned Schedule (schedule-based performance analysis)
• Forensics (comparison-based metrics for determining root cause of delay)

By default, the S2 // Diagnostics tab is automatically populated with multiple sub-tabs containing separate views for each of the metric libraries. You can edit each of these views with regards to adding/removing metrics to each of the three analyzers (ribbon, phase, intersection).