Project Health Check
Christopher William Young
While the Project Health Check is one of our most popular services, I am still often asked what a “health check” is for and why an organisation might want to undertake one. I thought I would outline the main objectives and benefits of undertaking a health check as I find them extremely valuable as a tool for ensuring project success.
The key objectives of a Project Health Check include:
– To determine the current state of the project and detect problems early enough so that the project team has the capacity to deal with them.
– To identify factors that will enable or disable the potential of delivering the anticipated outcome and benefits of the project. Key areas under review include the following:
- Completion and clarity of Business Case / Benefits Realisation Plan
- Sufficiency of analysis and translation to definition of project outcomes
- Adequacy of Stakeholder Commitment & Support
- Adequacy of Project Initiation Process
- Adequacy of Scope Definition & Verification
- Adequacy of Requirements Definition & Verification
- Appropriateness of Project Approach
- Appropriateness of Project Organisation Structure & team
- Skills, knowledge and experience of Project Manager / Team Leaders
- Demonstrated competency of Project Manager / Team Leaders
- Skills, knowledge and experience of project team
- Adequate and timely risk identification, analysis , management and control
- Realism & Executablility of Project Plan (schedule) taking into account:
- Completeness of Project Plan
- Appropriate level of work decomposition
- Appropriate work steps such as:
- Project Initiation / Problem Definition
- Requirements Definition
- Analysis /Design (System Performance, System Capacity, IT infrastructure)
- System Development/Testing (Conversion, Application Security, Interfaces, Testing Co-ordination, Functional Testing, Business Acceptance Test Planning, Regression Test Processes, Integration Test Planning)
- Process Development/Testing (internal controls in process design)
- Change Management (Organisational Impacts, Communication and Training)
- Implementation Planning including Support Planning
- Reference to appropriate IT standards, processes and methods
- Sequencing of tasks in a logical sequence to deliver desired outcomes instead of silos of work by functional area
- Dependency definition ( doing the right tasks at the right time)
- Appropriate sizing of work into manageable packets of work
- Accuracy of work effort and duration estimation
- Adequacy of resourcing levels and appropriateness of types of resources applied
- Sufficiency of contingency planning
- Inclusion of checkpoints linked to appropriate implementation of deliverable (document) review sign off and management
- Appropriateness of wording in plan to enable its use as a communication document and management document
- Ability to baseline project plan and manage variance to plan
- Communication Planning
- Thoroughness of Stakeholder needs assessment
- Appropriateness of Information distribution
- Adequacy of Project Monitoring and Control
- Accuracy, adequacy and timeliness of performance reporting, replanning and change management
- Implementation of appropriate inclusive project status and team meetings
- Implementation of appropriate Steering Committee
- Adequacy of Issue Management and appropriate scope change control
- Adequacy of resource procurement process vendor and contract management
- Adequacy of Financial Management including:
- Development of project budget and expenditure forecasts
- Implementation of adequate, accurate and timely processes to manage and report project cost
– To analyse findings and present detailed recommendations addressing each of the issues identified.
Overall, this helps to ensure a shared understanding and commitment between the project team & the ultimate business stakeholders to a realistic and executable strategy to resolve issues as agreed.
Christopher William Young is the founder of White Water Consulting and is a senior consultant with a broad knowledge and experience in financial services, project management, change management and information technology. His areas of focus include delivering business-aligned IT strategy and implementing best practices in process improvement, project management and software development process. White Water Consulting (http://www.whitewater.com.au) specializes in the successful delivery business critical projects and provides practical solutions to designing and implementing information technology strategy.
