Project Health Check & Audit

Successful project delivery is critical to the wellbeing of any business. Project success is achieved through confidence in the health of a project and through being able to anticipate potential issues early enough to act on them. However, project sponsors, managers and the project team are often so involved in the day-to-day activities that they fail to acknowledge the true status of a project. Risks and issues go undetected or are ignored simply because the project team has blind faith that the benefits will materialise, or because they are so involved in the daily operational detail that they can’t see the big picture.

PIPC Approach

PIPC’s independent project Health Check & Audit provides a detailed, factual and impartial analysis of a project. It provides a clear understanding of the project and helps convince Executive teams to proceed with a project or reassure them once it is underway that it is the right thing to do and it is being done in an effective way. However, a number of common misconceptions exist that prevent sponsors from commissioning project Health Checks. These are:

• the analysis takes too long and by the time the results are published, the project has already changed shape
• the assessment process is disruptive due to the time it demands from key resources
• the output from the assessment is presented in a format that focuses on volume of content - with quantity of output ranked above quality
• the assessment will not provide sufficient value to warrant the investment.

As part of our project Health Check process, we have developed a Project Health Diagnostic (PhD) tool that is simple, rapidly applied and will provide a quantitative, visual and easily assimilated output.

At a glance, the improvement areas that will yield the greatest benefit are identified; action can then be taken to accordingly focus business efforts.

A project Health Check can be performed at any stage throughout a project’s lifecycle and should be applied to ensure a rigorous project framework is in place to provide a platform for success.

When to use Health Checks

Project Health Checks can be performed to assess the project health or audit compliance, or they can be used as an ongoing control tool applied at periodic intervals throughout the project lifecycle. The project Health Check is of most value when a project is considered to be:

• failing to deliver the expected business benefits
• a frequently changing organisation structure (new sponsors, managers, team members)
• undergoing timescale slippage or scope creep
• experiencing escalating costs or benefit deterioration
• an exemplar project, where help is required to capture all the key learning points.

Project Health Checks can be applied at any time during the project lifecycle, with emphasis placed on different aspects of the project during its different stages.

PIPC Proposition

Project Health Checks are a highly valuable mechanism to gain assurance of project delivery - from mobilisation through to realisation. In the running of project Health Checks, we bring extensive experience and knowledge and a proven approach that accurately, confidently and rapidly assesses a project’s performance.

In delivering this, we always ensure:

• the project Health Check enhances the chances of project success
• the output is “action-oriented” – an action plan is rapidly developed to take immediate effect for both short- and long-term results
• major project risks and issues are identified early
• there is buy-in and commitment to the action plan from the whole project team
• the whole process and output inspires the confidence of the Steering Committee and belief that the project will deliver the desired outcomes
• the final report is objective and delivers constructive feedback but does not apportion blame
• it demands very little time of a project team and provides comparable measures across single or multiple projects – allowing best practice benchmarks to be determined.

PIPC specialises in project Health Checks and Project Audits to provide fast and reliable results. Many businesses have benefited from our approach and have been able to improve the likelihood of project success.