[Music Intro]
>>Hi.
I am Devon Dean, Content Director here at ProjectManager.com.
In today’s whiteboard session, I will give you another quality assurance tool to help
you ensure your project stays on track and delivers expectations.
Now, today’s topic is about the project phase review.
For each of the major phases of the project, you should take you time to catch your breath,
pause and review the phase that you just completed, do a quick mini health check about it, and
get yourself oriented and ready to go into the next phase.
Typically, you do about three project phase reviews for every project that you do, one
at the end of initiation, a phase review at the end of the planning phase, and lastly
a phase review at the end of execution.
It is really just a small health check to get you, your sponsors and your key stakeholders
together to review what has just happened and get ready for what is going to happen
next in terms of the next phase.
So, really you are just looking at some very top level details of the project to give them
an idea of how the project tracked through that phase.
The first item that you will look at is the schedule.
Were you on track with what you intended to do in terms of delivering on the original
baseline schedule for your project.
So you review the schedule, how you did it, and hopefully there you have done everything
right and you have achieved your target for hitting the schedule.
The budget: Did you have enough budget for that phase?
How are you tracking?
Are you 10% under?
Are you 5% over.
It is an opportunity to review the budget.
Look at your cash flow and your spending plan, and just assess if it is in a healthy state.
Next, you look at the deliverables that you have produced and been approved by the users.
Were they of the quality that you were expecting?
Did they have all the content and did they meet 100% of the requirements that they were
seeking to achieve and producing that deliverable?
List them out and give an assessment on how well your project achieved on producing that
deliverable.
The risks: Plot out the top level risks that your project had identified and had mitigated
during that phase of the project.
It is important to get a sense of the likelihood to complete your project, and by looking at
the risks that you have actually been able to mitigate, can give a sense on how well
the next phase will go.
Have a plot of the issues that you encountered in your project and how you actually dealt
with those and took action to resolve those issues.
If you have got a laundry list of issues that your project is encountering, maybe before
you go into the next phase, it might make sense to do another risk identification session
so that you could pull out these likely things to happen, plot them in your risk register
and develop strategies to mitigate them from happening and preventing them from becoming
issues.
As you know, when issues hit your project, timelines start to grow, costs certainly start
to grow, and the likelihood of achieving your objectives start to diminish.
So, in that previous phase review that you are doing, let us say the planning phase,
if you hit a lot of issues there, maybe it makes sense to stop and do another risk planning
session.
Changes: What changes has your project encountered during that phase and how to actually actively
manage them?
If scope changes have happened during execution, did you just allow those to happen?
Or did you manage the scope changes through a proper process?
List out all the changes that have happened to your project and how they were managed?
It is important, especially around these changes, to give yourself a bit of a scorecard because
if you start seeing changes to your project start to blossom uncontrollably, then I definitely
would ensure you raise your hand as a project manager and say, “Hey, look, we maybe didn’t
define the requirements well enough; therefore, leading to all these changes.
Let us stop the project and re-baseline and reassess what we are doing.”
These phase reviews allow the stakeholders, the project owners and yourself as a project
manager to just take time to reassess what the project is doing, if it is still relevant
to the business and how you are chalking on achieving the deliverables and the outcomes
you are looking for.
It is also an opportunity and another window complementing your weekly status reports,
to give your project owners and your stakeholders confidence that your project is delivering
to its target deadlines, to the deliverables which it is attempting to get across the line,
and the benefits which the project will enable for that business.
For more project management tips and tricks and to try out our software, come join us
at ProjectManager.com.