For CEOs and executives, the project status report is often a narrative of optimism, not reality. To ensure your strategic initiatives are not facing a "career-threatening battle," you must possess a rapid, high-impact diagnostic tool that reveals the unfiltered truth about project health.
Assess Project™’s Health Questionnaire is the concise, eight-question stress test designed for business leaders to immediately audit the core operational integrity of any project. Any confusing, unclear, or muddled response is an immediate cause for executive alarm.
We provide the acronym MISSION™ to guide your inquiry.
| Acronym | Key Executive Inquiry |
Core Diagnostic Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Mission | Management Recap (The "Why"): Why are we doing this project? | Can every team member deliver a coherent, understandable response in under 30 seconds that addresses purpose, business outcome, and benefits? Is there consistency in responses across all constituents? |
| Interdependencies | Risk Mapping: What are the critical interdependencies of this project? | Does the team explicitly articulate all necessary connections to other systems, processes, or projects? Is there a coordinated plan, or does the question yield a "blank stare"? |
| Sponsorship | Executive Accountability: Do leaders demonstrate active, ownership-level support? | Are leaders attending meetings, making critical decisions promptly, and actively allocating People, Time, CAPEX/OPEX? Do they accept ownership and deliver ongoing advocacy via actions? |
| Stakeholders | Frontline Engagement: Are stakeholders genuinely passionate about and engaged in the project work? | Are the fully committed stakeholders drawn from the frontline (the primary users of the solution)? Have they provided the necessary full-time commitment, and are they delivering the requisite business direction? |
| Integration | Solution Interlock: Are the points of integration clearly specified? | Does the solution plan quantify the work required to integrate other applications, technologies (social, mobile, cloud), and organizational dependencies? Are integration stakeholders identified and engaged? |
| Organization | Impact Quantification: Has the project's impact on the organization been quantified? | Are the required changes to roles, skills, relationships, and structure specified and adequately quantified in the project plans, schedules, and budgets? |
| Nurture | Sustained Value Plan: How will the beneficiaries of this project be nurtured post-implementation? | Is a clear, funded plan in place for continuous nurturing (post-implementation support, reinforcement training, ongoing benefit management) over the solution's life? |
The 8th Question: The Trust Test -- Teamwork Matters.
Look around the room: Would you go into a potentially career-threatening battle with the people sitting around the table?
The 8th question cuts to the core of team health. Successful execution requires a team embodying:
If the answer to the 8th question is anything less than a resounding "Yes," your project is fundamentally flawed and requires immediate executive intervention.
