One of the most common complaints of project managers is that they are forced to spend 80% of their time trawling the project meetings, notes, documents and reports in order to establish relevant and accurate information about the health of their project. The time spent actually using this information to optimize the efficiency and head off trouble is less than 20%. This activity known as business activity monitoring has 4 main components:

• project objectives: generally related to project tasks and processes ("finish the software integration by August 15th" or "reduce the number of defects per line of code by 10%" ...).
• key process indicators: measurements of project objectives current status
• balanced scorecards: compilation of KPI's from various aspects. Originally these were strict interpretations of finance, learning&growth, customers, and business aspects but in project groups the scorecards often concentrate on specific project areas.
• critical success factors: these are dependencies which have to be fulfilled for the objectives to be met (" in order to meet the Aug 15th deadline we need to recruit 2 new test engineers before June 30th"...)

In the past business activity monitoring metrics were typically presented at a periodic management meeting resulting in a frantic collection exercise just before the meeting. However the trend over the last few years has been to present this information in real time with up to the minute accuracy on internet dashboards.

The collection of this project data is expensive and often inaccurate and may even be prone to departmental politics in some cases. Automating the collection process is therefore very attractive.