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Project Health Checks
Are you concerned about one of your projects?
Do you have doubts concerning the likelihood of a project delivering as planned?
Are you worried about a project running over time and budget?
Do you have a project busy derailing?
Do you want peace of mind that your project is on track?
Is your project being managed in conformance with your organization’s Project Management Methodology?
Do you need confirmation that your project is managed according to your organization’s quality standards?
If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, you need a project health check.
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What is a project health check?
A project health check is a quick assessment of the overall state of health of a project. It is done during the life of a project in order to ensure that the project is on track. If a project is found to be slipping and losing control, a plan is established quickly to bring it back on track. It is therefore a key measure to prevent a project from going off the rails completely.
Why do a project health check?
Most organizations perform a project post mortem after a project is completed. This is necessary in order to capture learnings for subsequent use, but entirely useless for the completed project.
We perform project health checks during the project life span in order to increase the likelihood of project success. We are concerned about the eventual stakeholder satisfaction, which makes it an essential tool for the project manager.
Without a project health check, projects are often found to be runaway projects when it is already too late. The consequences in these cases are disastrous, as it often requires total re-planning, re-structuring, re-financing and often re-staffing.
With project health checks, we are able to identify problems early enough to take corrective action to get the project back on track.
Why  ?
Project Health checks are best performed by an independent party. The party should have no connection to the project or its stakeholders that could compromise objectivity. Some organizations task their project support office to perform project health checks. This is obviously a step in the right direction. We have found however that the health check diagnosis often reveals sensitive issues that are difficult to report on unless the party is totally unaffected by the organizational politics.
Methodology/approach.
developed a personalised methodology to perform project health checks. The process requires a highly skilled practitioner that is able to engage with project stakeholders and cut to the heart of project issues within a minimum timeframe. Currently this service is personally coordinated by Ganief. The service is concluded by a report detailing the key findings of the study, and recommending a plan of action where appropriate.
At we understand that each organisation has their own unique culture and approach. It is for this reason that we keep our methodology and approach quite flexible, and allow for a degree of customization.
The entire process can take as little as two and a half days.
When should project health checks be performed?
The average project should have a health check performed at least once during its life span. The exact amount of health checks should be decided by factors such as:
• The strategic nature of the project
• The project delivery timeframe
• The project budget
• The impact of project failure.
A project health check should not be kept until too late in the process, as most projects go wrong quite early in the process. Some of our clients budget for at least one project health check per project, and ensures that this process forms part of the project delivery plan. For larger projects, the health checks are scheduled at key decision points within the project life.
Project health checks can also be commissioned on an ad-hoc basis, i.e. as soon as the stakeholders experience some uncomfortable symptoms. It is quite common for a project sponsor to call for a project health check when uneasiness sets in, even if only to give peace of mind.
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