For CEOs and executive sponsors, project assessments are not academic exercises—they are essential governance interventions designed to preserve capital, mitigate catastrophic risk, and validate strategic alignment.
The Assess Project™ approach provides a structured, six-step process to ensure your most critical initiatives are on track, or to execute "significant surgery" when necessary to preserve budget and benefit integrity.
| Phase | Executive Focus & Mandate |
Critical Action |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Align on Objectives | Confirm Governance & Strategy: Identify major problems early, ensure sufficient leadership governance is in place, and validate that the right skills are employed to produce the right solution. | Define a specific assessment scope that targets key risk areas (e.g., skill gaps, governance structure, decision-making velocity). |
| 2. Select an Assessor | Mandate Independence: This is the most critical step. Avoid conflicts-of-interest where the assessor has a stake in any project organization (vendor, consultant, or constituent). | Hire a truly unbiased expert unconnected to any partner, ensuring the report is unfiltered and not "spun" to protect existing interests. |
| 3. Establish an Approach | Validate Scope and Expectations: Confirm understanding of project objectives, financials (budgets, actuals, forecasts), risks, issues, and stakeholder expectations with the assessor. | Finalize the assessment plan, confirming scope, timing, roles, and the communication protocol for sensitive findings. |
| 4. Conduct Assessment | Uncover Reality: Conduct assessments before kickoff and after each primary work cycle (Decide, Design, Develop, Deploy). Review key deliverables and execution elements (Strategy, Process, Relationships, Technology, Operations—SPRONTO™). | Be inclusive: The assessor must engage all leaders, team members, and partners (including "outlier" perspectives) for a comprehensive 360-degree view. |
| 5. Report Assessment Results | Transparent Intervention: Draft findings and recommendations and review them with the project sponsors and leadership first. Do not assign or direct blame. Use findings as a "teaching moment" to develop a treatment plan. | Track and Resolve: Ensure follow-up measures are assigned responsibility, tracked diligently, and closed quickly, providing updates to governance steering meetings. |
| 6. Conduct Post-Project Assessment | Institutionalize Knowledge: After deployment, facilitate an After Action Dialogue (AAD) to capture, document, and share lessons learned with senior business and technology leaders. | Organize knowledge into a shared, enterprise-wide repository to prevent repeating past mistakes and ensure continuous organizational learning. |
Assessment findings may be difficult to hear, but they are essential to diagnose and treat a failing initiative. Be prepared for the assessment's "treatment plan" to recommend significant surgery—such as compromising on features or scope—in return for a successful outcome that preserves the integrity of your budget and the majority of the project’s benefits.
You must sponsor a thorough, objective process and commit to timely resolution to increase your project success rates.
