How To Do Project Reviews

Agile and Scrum / By

Project review is one of the most important task of a project manager. It is so critical that if it is not done effectively, it can lead to adverse consequences including failure of the project. So a project manager needs to take it very seriously. Project review must be done phase wise, one should spend good amount of time to review the phase once it is complete. It is recommended to do a quick mini health check about it, so that the project is ready to go into the next phase. Typically, a project manager do about three project phase reviews for most of the projects, one at the end of initiation, second at the end of the planning phase, and lastly at the end of execution of the project.

It is a kind of a small health check to get the PM, sponsors and the key stakeholders together to review what is already done and get ready for what is going to happen in the next phase. Review at initial stage means just looking at some very top level details of the project to get an idea of how the project tracked through that phase.

Steps to review a project

  • The first item that a project manager looks at is the schedule of the project. He checks if the project is on track by comparing it with original baseline schedule for the project. So he reviews the schedule, how it is done, and if the project team have done everything right without any deviation in the original plan.
  • Cost and budget comes next in line. The manager calculates Cost Performance Index (CPI) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI) to check if the project is over budget, under budget, on schedule or behind the schedule. He looks at the cash flow and the spending plan, and checks if it is in a healthy state.
  • Next, the PM looks at the deliverables that the project team have produced and been approved by the users. Analyze the quality of the delivery, and checks if they met 100% of the requirements that they were seeking to achieve and producing that deliverable? He lists down all the findings and give an assessment on how well the project achieved on producing that deliverable.
  • After quality the project manager checks for the risks, compare the risks occurred with the risks identified in the initial stages. It is important to get a sense of the likelihood to complete the project, and by looking at all the risks that were mitigated, it is easy to get a sense on how well the next phase would go. If there is list of issues that the project is encountering, before the next phase, it might make sense to do a risk reassessment so that one could pull out these likely things to happen, list them in the risk register so that new mitigation strategies can be developed, resulting in preventing them to turn into a major risk later on.
  • Lastly  comes the Changes and Change Requests: A complete list of all the changes encountered during that phase and how to actually actively they were managed? If scope changes have happened during execution, what precautions were taken? Did you the proper change management process followed for all the changes?

The health of the project is defined as green (everything on track), amber (not on track but very few issues and things are expected to be on track) and red (nothing on track). These phase reviews allow the key stakeholders, the project sponsor and the project manager to just take time to reassess the project, and analyze if it is still relevant to the business and how the team is performing to achieve the deliverables on time.

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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