From Good to Great

Continual evaluations cultivate skills and knowledge necessary for today's leaders. Project review workshops allow you to mentor your staff, bringing them to the next level.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

Institutionalizing project management best practices across an organization is a work in progress. It never ends. Project review workshops are great tools to foster the skills and transfer the knowledge necessary to being a world-class project organization.
The executive is in the best position to drive this practice across an organization and ensure it is routinely applied. The commitment to project review workshops shows the executive both cares about project success and team development.
Project review workshops are a formal classroom technique used to examine active projects and assess their overall health, identifying both areas of praise and improvement.
A project review workshop typically lasts two workdays--any longer and it can be too exhaustive for the participants. Three to four projects are selected, and their project managers and two to three members of each project team are invited to attend. The audience should total about 20, no more than 30.
The team prepares a set of slides describing the state of their project. As the slides are presented, the workshop instructor and attendees probe with questions in order to assess the true health of the project.
Two sets of blank flipcharts--Praise and Problems--are posted on the meeting room walls. As the presentation progresses, noteworthy praise items and problems are recorded.
When a project review is nearly complete, the instructor asks each attendee to assess the likelihood of that the project will achieve its delivery date. Then the instructor openly reviews each of the problems recorded and weighs them according to importance in their impact on the delivery date. The instructor then provides an assessment of the overall health of the project.
After the workshop, a brief report outlines the findings from each project reviewed. The report captures the items that were listed as praise or problems for each project as well as the risk assessments made by the instructor and participants. The project managers whose projects were reviewed then can develop action plans to address the most important problems identified.
A project review workshop benefits all who participate as well as the executives who make it happen. Project managers learn a great deal about how well they and their teams are performing, and they walk away with specific items to address. All participants learn from the other presentations and take back new ideas and thinking for current and future projects. The executive team witnesses the continual improvement in applying project management best practices across the organization contributing to lower costs, increased productivity, improved schedule and budget commitments--all leading to improved customer relationships.
The project review workshop develops more than skills. It can be difficult to hear others publicly call your baby "ugly," no matter how constructively the analysis comes across. The lessons learned will not soon be forgotten. Furthermore, often just preparing the presentation forces a project team to think through and solve many of their problems before publicly exposing the state of their work.
For maximum benefit, project review workshops should be conducted every four to six months. The goal is to focus on the major projects across an organization, as well as provide follow-up reviews on longer-running projects to ensure progress.
The project review workshop is one of those defining tools that transitions an organization from good to great. It is the sort of tool that executives find themselves constantly in search of.
There is no better method than mentoring to develop effective project managers and teams. But the special note here is that this technique does not focus on helping an isolated project succeed; it helps projects across the whole organization achieve success. Project review workshops push the envelope on continuous positive change required across an organization by which all stakeholders benefit. Sponsoring never felt so good!
Are you leading to success?

Neal Whitten, PMP, president of The Neal Whitten Group (www.nealwhittengroup.com), is a speaker, trainer, consultant, mentor, and author in project management and employee development. His books include The EnterPrize Organization: Organizing Software Projects for Accountability and Success and Managing Software Development Projects: Formula for Success.

This material is reprinted from PM Network magazine (October 2003) with permission of the Project Management Institute Headquarters, Four Campus Boulevard, Newtown Square, PA 19073-2399 USA. Phone: (610) 356-4600. Fax: (610) 356-4647. Project Management Institute (PMI) is the world's leading project management association with over 100,000 members worldwide. For further information, contact PMI Headquarters at (610) 356-4600 or visit the web site at www.pmi.org. "PMI" and "PM Network" are trademarks of the Project Management Institute, Inc. © 2003 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved.

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