Dear Krithika Kaushik,
In the footnote, you mentioned that you are from the software consulting industry and work from home. However, please confirm the average length of the project in days, weeks, or months, and generally, how many team members are involved in the project.
Project Management Tools
Please confirm what project management tools your company uses. Does your company use PERT and CPM techniques? Which project management software is used by your company?
Ideas for Project Bonus Disbursement
a) The primary eligibility for receiving the project bonus is, of course, completing the project on time. However, if there are design faults while making the schedule, the project may get delayed. In this case, team members may argue that it was not their fault, as they discovered the design fault at a much later stage. The change in design caused the delay.
b) The second factor to consider is measuring the number of hours spent on the project. Do you calculate hours as "Budgeted Vs Actual Vs Billed"? Among these three factors, you need to establish a relationship between hours spent, actual vs. billed. If it exceeds "x," how do team members become eligible for the bonus?
c) This is similar to (b) above but focuses on project cost. You need to measure "budgeted cost Vs actual cost Vs billed cost." If the billed cost is less than the actual cost, only then will the project members become eligible for the bonus.
d) The next consideration is customer satisfaction. Okay, the project deadline was met, but what if major bugs are discovered after a few months? What if these bugs impact the customer's business? What if the customer imposes a penalty for the faulty delivery of the project? Therefore, you need to decide on the timeline for the disbursement of the bonus amount as well.
e) Lastly, who would be eligible to receive the bonus amount? What if a project member leaves the job? Will he/she still be eligible? Suppose at the time of the actual disbursement of the bonus amount, some project members are no longer with the company. Will they be eligible to receive the bonus? If not, where will their share go? Will it be absorbed by the company or distributed among other project members who are still employed?
These are some of the ideas. While designing the policy for the disbursement of the project bonus, please consider all possibilities. Once the policy is rolled out, making changes thereafter could demotivate employees. Therefore, demonstrate anticipation and prevent potential disgruntlement.
Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar