A project assessment is diagnostic. Its importance is similar to periodic health physicals.

Project assessments:

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  Provide an opportunity for early problem identification and diagnosis before your project veers off-course.
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  Identify and remediate barriers to success. Identify potential issues, risks, and circumstances that, if not mitigated, will reduce the likelihood of your project delivering a successful business outcome.
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  Provide a lens into the “real” health of your project.

As previously discussed, many people:

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  Avoid thoughts or situations that may be painful.
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  Experience “loss aversion.”
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  Engage in wishful thinking that a problem or circumstance will work its way out to resolution.

In the world of technology projects, things never work out by themselves. Tremendous energy, both effort, and emotion are required to change project behavior and direction.

Project assessments assure business constituents that their project is on course to efficiently and effectively enable business case benefits.
Most importantly, constituents need accurate, objective, and realistic feedback on project status and health to take timely corrective action.

All projects, regardless of size, benefit from the second set of independent eyes to objectively assess if they’re on a trajectory to deliver successful outcomes.

Who engages in project assessments?

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  Engage core team leadership, team members, and partners as part of the assessment process.
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  All key sponsors and constituents should engage in project assessments to provide their perspectives and voice their concerns and issues.

Business constituents should own and sponsor the assessment process to ensure a realistic and objective view of project health is delivered.

Each project's situation and environment is different. At a minimum, these are the critical roles of who should be involved.

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  Project Assessor: The person filling the role of project assessor, or quality assurance, engages in and drives the assessment process
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  Business Team Members: Sponsor, business leads, and SMEs.
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  Business Constituents: Constituents representing business areas, including upstream, downstream, internal, and external capabilities, impacted by your project.
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  Business Leadership: Senior leadership representatives from the business areas and capabilities engaged and affected your project.
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  Other: Business specialists, such as legal, procurement, human resources, and technology, as required.
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  Core Team Leadership: Project Manager, Team Leads, IT-Business Liaisons, Delivery Leader.
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  Partner Team Members: Key vendor leaders engaged in your project.
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  Other Constituencies: Other project observers, such as functional leaders, know and observe project activities, results, and impacts. Why? It’s essential to get a diversity of views on project activities and achievements. That is similar to 360-degree peer reviews that managers and leaders participate in to get a complete “all-around” perspective of their performance.

Project assessment should occur at key milestones throughout your project, from Initiate through Deploy.

Integrate assessments into your project’s plan. Your plan should address assessment scope, timing, roles, and deliverables.

Complete assessments in a matter of days or weeks, depending on the size and complexity of your project:

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  Schedule and execute all data-gathering activities, such as interviews, essential document collection, etc., over one to two weeks.
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  Prepare a report and communicate the final results within a week after completion of the fieldwork.

An assessment conducted after a project is completed should be leveraged as an after-action dialogue (AAD) to ensure your organization captures, documents, and disseminates lessons learned.

Exceptional project circumstances or critical issues may necessitate more frequent assessments.

The individual designated for conducting assessments should meet with key constituents.

Those meetings should:

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  Surface project objectives, scope, methods, budget, and schedule.
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  Provide the assessor with an understanding of the work, perceived risks, constituent expectations, and assumptions.
  
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  Educate constituents on the assessment process.
  
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  Uncover constituent concerns or areas of interest that your assessment process should monitor.