Audit project assessment tool

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Use this customizable Microsoft Excel assessment to audit your project management capabilities, identify areas for improvement, and get a list of recommended tools and resources to help you improve your process. You need to audit your project management competencies and understand your level of process maturity. You are required to identify a way to evaluate your organization's current project management capabilities in order to determine how you can be a more effective project manager.

For each of these different areas you are required to select the level of process maturity you believe you have. Once you have gone through the audit in this project management maturity assessment, you will be able to determine what the level of process maturity is for each of the categories listed on the scorecard tab. In this resource, we also provide you with an overall project management score. The primary use of the quality assessment data is to understand organizational issues that affect project quality and to react to trends before they begin to cause project failure.

Monthly reviews take no longer now than they did before we began quantifying project quality, typically between 30 minutes and an hour per project. A small additional amount of clerical effort is required to enter data from the score sheets into a project quality tracking database each month, but no additional effort is required of project managers or reviewers.

About two thirds of the 28 assessment questions on the current survey form relate to project quality factors; one third relate to organizational factors. The concept of correct performance is somewhat subjective. From the point of view of a project manager who is new to the organization, something may be broken based on previous experience in another organization, but performing exactly as expected to someone who has grown up with it.

The summarization of opinions of a number of people with differing viewpoints and levels of experience tends to minimize the subjectivity of the measurements. Project quality factors are evaluated against QPM-defined standards and practices.

Project factors include such things as:. Organizational factors focus on the adequacy of the support provided to the project by various internal functional units or agents. We have been collecting quality assessment data on approximately 15 projects since October In January , we published score sheet factor guidelines based on feedback from reviewers. Data collected since then shows greater uniformity, although we don't expect to see unanimity; the ratings remain somewhat subjective.

Appendix A contains an example of factor guidelines. We have not yet collected and analyzed enough data to begin to point to specific areas of our project practice that might be contributing to variable results. There have, however, been some positive measurement effects resulting from the structured data collection process. Project managers have begun to be more aware of process conformance expectations on the part of reviewing managers. This has helped them to focus on understanding and executing critical process activities they may have seen as secondary to their responsibility.

A number of project managers have asked for assistance in understanding how to do things their managers assumed they already knew how to do. Reviewers representing different interests within the organization are becoming more familiar with the cross-functional nature of project success as they participate in discussion about the ratings.

Reviewers enter data in their score sheet during the course of the review. Since the data format is uniform, little time is required to record the results in the database.

The PMO manages the data analysis and reporting process and we do not publish ratings of individual reviewers or individual project results. There is a better opportunity to see the next crisis coming. It is now possible to focus attention on those factors that have the greatest impact on project success. They seem to value the quantified feedback as a tool to help them improve their project practice.

As we continue to maintain the anonymity of individual reviewers and only publish organizational statistics and trends, we are making summary trend data available to project managers for their projects.

We expect that the data resulting from audits will be more accurate than that obtained during the monthly review since the scope and depth of review is more thorough. We plan to test the validity of our review data by comparing review scores for individual projects with their audit scores.

Managers now have a tool to help them understand what's happening in the face of the increasing complexity of the rapidly growing organization. Before this initiative, they had a collection of apparently unrelated project crisis anecdotes. Now they have a way of differentiating project difficulties that are the result of very specific local events from those that stem from organizational factors. It is these systemic problems that tend to affect the ability of all projects to weather the storms of the inevitable opportunities for invention.

As they work to resolve immediate crises, the organizational memory this tool provides will allow managers to also reflect on the big picture. The cost for this capability is negligible. The concept of adding numerical measurements to routine reviews is quite extensible. In the months we have been using the project quality measurement system, we have identified some additional factors for study and have immediately been able to add them to the survey.

People from other parts of our organization have expressed interest in applying this data collection and analysis principle to other aspects of the business where regular anecdotal reviews are already in use.

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A simple organizational project quality assessment tool. How to cite this article: Saunders, L. Reprints and Permissions. Most organizations depend on accidental discovery of trouble events to signal potential project failures.

A project manager declares a project "red" because some key milestone was missed. A key contributor threatens to quit because "everything is always screwed up".

Quality-focused project delivery organizations typically use regular management reviews to attempt to identify troubled projects before they become at risk for failure. Building on organizational learning, these reviews typically employ templates for status reporting that tend to guide project managers toward identifying problems in key areas that are known to have caused trouble in the past and checklists that focus attention on these same key areas.

Unless the same manage. Lawrence K. The Problem It appeared that project factors we didn't understand were eluding our careful reviews. Exhibit 1. Project Quality Factors.