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Effective Project Management Reviews
September 4, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Closure
Effective Project Management Reviews
By Zenkara
One of the more common aspects of projects that are often skimmed over too quickly is that of project reviews – also called project post-mortems, post-project reviews, post implementation reviews and Agile Retrospectives. It is often scheduled to occur at the end of a project, but doesn’t happen due to:
- Competing priorities
- Running over budget
- New projects already started and/or running late
Even though they are generally conducted at the end of projects, they can in fact be conducted at any time during the project life cycle. When you conduct them at the end of a phase or major piece of work you have the opportunity to gain useful and productive insights whilst there is still time –project team members have better visibility of what is going on as well as providing benefits to other projects and the organisation as a whole.
How reviews are conducted depends on your style of running a project (and company for that matter) – some like things done in a formal way, other like to make it a social, egalitarian gathering where anyone can raise anything with fear of recrimination. The more enlightened managers will engender an environment where this is appreciated.
Doing some leg work first will enable things to run smoother – people like to have something already started rather than having a blank sheet of paper or whiteboard starting back at them.
Here’s a list of some simple steps for conducting effective reviews:
- Identify stakeholders
- Identify the best method to gather information from each group/person
- Schedule review walkthrough/retrospective
- Provide brief of what will be covered and the rules of engagement
- Collect factual details (scope, budget, schedule, quality)
- Gather input from people who can’t attend
- Review what is currently working well, where we’re off-track, what we can do about it for various areas of the project
- Allocate actions to relevant stakeholders
- Forward results to all team members, stakeholders and place on a common board for everyone to see
- Integrate actions where appropriate into company procedures/forms
Note: You can also download the Project Reviews Template.
Zenkara focuses on streamlining and deploying business processes and quality systems and accelerating decision making through OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and metrics systems. Zenkara is located in Brisbane, Australia.
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2 people have left comments
Not only is this a great list, I couldn’t agree more. Simply ticking off tasks as completed while you do the job doesn’t always mean you’ve completed the job, nor does it let everyone know what you’ve done at the end.
I’ve also found that an end of project review is a great springboard for ideas to be implemented on the next project, learning how others have dealt with situations or met deadlines. Sure, the end result is to make sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, but beyond that, it’s a learning and growing process too.
What a very important website? I cant help musing over the amount of resources you have placed here at our disposal. This is indeed and incredible amount of work that has been done.
Please keep the spirit alive.