Question

Project health checks. Why is good practice to allow stakeholders to participate in the health checks? Why would you perform a nonroutine project health check? who else should be involved in project health checks? Must contain 300 words or more.

Answer 1

As a project manager you will need to conduct a project health check when the project is not achieving the planned goals and objectives. Even the best planned projects will encounter problems along the way. These hurdles however, do not mean that your project is doomed to failure. The key is to identify these challenges early and take the appropriate steps to get your project back on track. A project health check can be conducted when you have just taken over a project from a project manager or during a project that is underway and you need to have an understanding of why the project is running into trouble.

The structure and process of a project will always encompass key processes and in PMBOK we refer to these as the triple constraints and each project will be broken down into:

• Scope

• Cost

• Time

Quality will also be taken into the configuration as this has to be measured for a successful delivery.

A project health charter is setup to provide the project manager with the authority to move ahead with the project audit and to ensure that there is enough budget assigned and resources allocated for the project audit to be conducted

• Identify stakeholders
• Identify the project team
• Compile the charter
• Review charter
• Update the charter with the feedback
• Approve the charter

It is well known that in most business arenas, the cost of correcting an issue is many times the cost of preventing it. Looming problems can go undetected or be ignored because the project team has faith that if they just follow the plan the benefits will materialise. At an enterprise level, conducting checks on a sample of projects enables common issues and non-compliance to be captured and resolved in a cost-effective way and applied to future projects.

There are two ways you can approach project the checks:

• Perform when the project is in trouble to identify what needs to be fixed.
• As part of the planned project review process to identify problems before they occur. Proactive checks ensure the project begins and runs as efficiently as possible, but a reactive check can set an over-budget or late project back on track.

Both have their place, depending on the size of the organisation and project complexity.