Qualitative Measures
Qualitative measures are generally used in academic fields which are heavily involved with human behavior like the humanities. In business, however, they are typically used for the purpose of organizational decision making. Quantitative measures are used primarily in the business sciences and have much more predictive value than qualitative measures.
If we want to measure organizational effectiveness across projects then we must use both qualitative measures and quantitative ones. Quantitative measures can help project managers forecast where in the process the money is going and whether it is being spent effectively. In the end, though, only qualitative measures can give us the information we really need in order to make better business decisions. We know how effective a particular project is in terms of its delivery time and cost, but how can we tell if it is meeting our organizational objectives? By using a simple form of qualitative measures, like surveys, we can determine exactly how well the project is doing and whether it is meeting goals we have set.
The benefits of using both qualitative and quantitative measurements in any organization are twofold: using qualitative measures will help managers make better decisions about which projects to pursue and which ones to abandon, and quantitative ones will help us to understand the efficiency of the organization as a whole. However, in the case of small organizations, it can be difficult to separate the two and so it can sometimes be useful to combine the two measures in one simple piece of software. In the software warehouse project example mentioned earlier, we saw how having standardized lists of materials within each project would make it much easier to track and manage costs. By combining a list of materials within each project and using a form of qualitative measures, we were able to make the whole organization much more transparent.
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