AUDITING PROJECTS

"I learn from my successes, and even more from my failures."

This learning from a project is facilitated by reviewing and assessing the work performed by individuals, teams, partners, customers and users.

Here is a brief insight into the various aspects of review of projects. This is based on experience and best practices developed from our experience, as well as some ISO and IEEE specifications.

• Interviews
• Individual discussions
• Closed team sessions
• Documentation reviews
• Feedback sessions
• Verifying the data collected from above exercises
• Comparison with other successful projects in the organization, to factor/eliminate the common project denominators in the company

• Team Psychology Click here for details
• Project specification
• Project Plan
• Customer requirements
• Requirement Specifications
• Customer contracts / Commitments
• MoU with the Customer
• Pre-project Estimates
• Historical records of similar projects
• Schedule
• Work procedures/practices
• Skillsets of Resources / Training
• Technology selection
• Standards
• Coding standards
• Quality strategy
• Review strategy
• Review records
• Customer support procedures
• Customer interface process
• Customer request
• Change requests
• Change control records
• Change history
• Corrective actions
• Documentations prepared for delivery with the Product
• Configuration management plan
• Risk management strategy/plan
• Risk analysis reports
• Existing Metrics/Measures
• Meeting minutes
• Project input and output work products
• Software development methodology
• Development/Test/Production environment
• Reuse strategy

• Input
• Approach used
• Audit tool(s) used
• Ratings
• Date
• The names of teams who participated in the audit
• Any additional information
• Any assessment assumptions and limitations.

• N; Not adequate: 0% weight
• P; Partially adequate: 25% weight
• L; Largely adequate: 75% weight
• F; Fully adequate: 100% weight

• N; Non-Existent: 0% weight
• Y; Existent: 100% weight

• Summary
• Overview
• Detailed report
• Report on:
• Technology used vs. ideal technology in the context of customer requirements and company strategy
• Methodology used vs. ideal methodology in the context of industry methodology and company strategy
• Project timelines & scope
• Dependency Matrix (Tables and Graphs)
• Decisions
• Management directives/orders
• Teams
• Team Deliverables
• Tables, Graphs (Scatter Plots, Radar graphs)
• Project members' personality/attitude - positive/negative mindset
• Every project member's individual assessment of the project against reasons for failure
• Every project member's individual assessment of the project deliverables
• Every project member's individual assessment of the project milestones
• Similar information, but from Customer's perspective

If you are interested, Evolvers' chief technologists would love to sit down with you and discuss the various approaches that an organization could start to take to cut cost while implementing business enhancing solutions.