Why do project reviews matter so much? The Agile Squad looks to provide project management training and to encourage you to build the best practices for your business. Part of this is creating robust project reviews for your business as part of business best practice.
Let’s explore the top 3 reasons why project reviews matter.
1. Organisational learning
It’s important that you touch base with the team within your organisational early into the process in order to ensure that your team learns the lessons necessary to be able to decipher what was successful, and, well, what wasn’t.
The old adage ‘hindsight is 2020’ very much applies here, as by taking an immediate retrospective analysis of the business you are able to then quantify and asses what is the best strategy going forward.
Try to organise your findings in a structured way in order to create accessible analysis that can be understood easily. Create a checklist that can be used across the business at large. Lessons are able to be learned from one project and communicated with colleagues working across the portfolio. Review participation allow teams to broaden their skill-base and make it far more applicable for a wider market.
2. Project Sponsors (plus any other Executives)
It probably doesn’t come as news to you that sponsors of projects need wide-reaching, transparent and easily digestible information and analysis of projects. Not only does this help to build trust between you and the project sponsor (and any other executives) but it also means that they’re making decisions going forward with their eyes wide open. Executives will need to make decisions around where funds are placed based off of what is working vs what isn’t, so this also gives the opportunity to really show off the great work of what has been achieved so far.
3. Project Managers
Last, but certainly not least, project managers need to be able to monitor effectiveness, draw from their own pool of expertise and transfer any lessons learned into organisational standards and checklists.
Through this, project managers are able to not only optimise current projects but also creative best practices for any and all future events. If you are a project manager yourself, it is important to take the right approach to conducting reviews.
Reviews can sometimes be received as a direct attack on a project’s perceived success, however, if you work reviews into the fabric of standard practice (i.e. quarterly or bi-annual reviews as standard) then they are instead seen as a chance to collaborate and create the most effective processes for the team at large.
The secret to success…
Whilst there is no ‘one-fits-all’ secret to success, taking the right risks and integrating improved operations into the running of projects on the basis that this is ever-evolving and constantly being refined, tells your team that there is always room for growth and there is always space to learn more.
Encouraging this within your business stops failures from repeating themselves and in turn allows your team to truly work to their potential and reap the benefits. I hope you enjoyed this brief rundown on why project reviews matter – please check back soon for more great content like this and share this article with like-minded people.
