There is so much knowledge about software project management available in bookstores, universities, businesses and the internet, if you encounter a problem in your project, chances are the right solution is already invented and waiting for you to find it.

Two problems are popping up here:

1) how do you define the problem in your project?

2) how do you find the right solution for your problem?

There is just too much information about it, but even worse, we are lacking a good vocabulary to link project problems to solutions. If I want to tackle this Project Profiling thing, this is one huge problem to solve.

How to solve it? I dunno. I do know that if you want to be able to use it in everyday project management, it should be simple and easy to use¦ so no huge frameworks and theoretic models.

Two possibilities come to my mind:

I love the solution provided in AntiPatterns in Project Management: they list some sentences that people use to describe the situation: They Dont Leave Me Alone!, These Users Keep Changing Their Minds If you walk around your project these sentences stick out and keep on lingering in your mind. Using these anecdotes as they call them, you can identify problematic situations and look up solutions based on the sentences.

Another possibility is the use of analyzing trends in metrics, like schedule slippage, budget overrun, programmer productivity, size of backlog, number of change requests, number of bugs found, number of test cases performed per day. The pattern of the trends can be a starting point for analysis, and combinations of these lines can be used as a descriptor of a problematic situation. This technique is used in The Fifth Discipline.