Project Management: Project Auditing for Risk Assurance

The success of programs and projects is critical to the bottom-line of organizations. Most projects face a number of challenges in meeting their time, budget and customer requirements. A project audit, sometimes referred to as a “program audit” or “project health check”, provides organizations an opportunity to create future program and project success and generate savings. Project audits may be conducted mid-way into a project or at the close of a project. Either way, they help to identify the root cause of problems and provide detailed guidance for how to get programs and projects back on track, if they are off track, or improve project performance on future projects. In this way, a project audit has a direct, positive bottom-line impact to the organization.

• Understand how to get a project that's in crisis back on track.
• Discover how to complete an effective project audit from beginning to end that will:
  • Uncover opportunities for successful completion of a project or program within the constraints of time, budget and customer expectations.
  • Identify issues, concerns and challenges preventing program and project success.
• Uncover leadership's "success criteria" for the program audit so that you are able to meet management's individual and collective needs.
• Understand how to plan the audit and conduct interviews with: steering committee members, sponsors, project team members and key stakeholders who will be impacted by the program to clarify expectations.
• Learn how to analyze a project to get to the root cause of problems and opportunities.
• Apply a project risk management process.
• Review the project's change management process.
• Discover how to audit the project's quality.
• Audit the project's methodology, processes, tools and templates.
• Apply the Project Management Institute's (PMI) Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), ISO 10006:2003 Guidelines for Quality Management in Projects and ISO 21500 Guidance on Project Management.
• Analyze the project schedules, budgets and quality performance.
• Discover how to prepare a project audit report to management with specific recommendations for overall performance improvement of the project.

The Critical Importance of Project Health Check and Audits

• How project health checks and/or audits will identify the opportunities for cost savings, reduction of non-value added projects, etc.
• Understand the stages in the management of projects to identify where opportunities for improvement through audits exist.
• Identify the opportunities for project audits in both the public and private sectors.
• Recognize the difference between the auditing of a programme and a project.
• Use the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), the ISO 10006:2003 Guidelines for Quality Management in Projects and the ISO 21500:2012 Guidance on Project Management for project health checks and audits.
• Determine the organizational readiness for a consistent approach to the management of projects by undertaking an organizational project culture review.
• Recommend strategies to help the organization create a project management environment where the management of projects becomes just part of what everyone does.

Introductory Exercise

Participants will have an opportunity to discuss their issues, concerns and challenges in the management of project audits and the assessments of risk on projects. As well, we will discuss the opportunities that project health checks and project audits present for the organization and/or department. Participants will undertake an examination of the culture of their organization and determine what is necessary to create the right environment which ensures consistency in the management of projects.

Plan the Project Audit

• Define the scope and objectives of the audit.
• Identify the expected success criteria for the audit.
• Understand the difference between a health check audit and a project closeout audit.
• Build your team and resources
• Identify and recognize the impact of the audit on various stakeholder groups.

Individual Case Studies - What Projects are you managing or must audit?

Participants will be encouraged to bring samples of projects that they are currently managing and/or that require a Health Check or Project Audit. We will work with these as well as other cases and examples provided by the instructor, throughout these two days.

Analyze the Project Initiation and Definition project stages

• Examine the chartering of the project to ensure it identified how the project aligned to organizational and/or departmental strategies.
• Review the project manager and project team member competencies.
• Determine whether or not the project manager and resources were selected based on a competency assessment.
• Review the extent to which the project manager and other project resources received adequate training for their responsibilities.
• Identify how the project team was created and structured.
• Ensure the project's sponsor, customer and other stakeholders have been correctly identified.

Case Study - Managing the Project in Crisis

Examples of actual projects in crisis will be presented to the participants. They will have to identify what is necessary in order to bring these projects into control. Their previous and expert knowledge will be used to help them identify the correct approach to start the project audit and bring the project under control.

Analyze the Project Planning Stage

• Analyze the Project Scope Statement.
• Ensure Project Plans have a sufficient amount of detail to ensure project control.
• Review the Work Breakdown Structure to ensure all of the activities and related tasks are identified to meet all project deliverables identified in the Project Scope Statement.
• Identify whether or not all of the resource requirements are allocated.
• Examine whether or not external resource requirements including suppliers and vendors have been allocated in the project plan.
• Ensure that duration estimates have been identified per task and that total Work Effort has been calculated.
• Review the project plan to ensure that all task dependencies (predecessors and successors) have been identified.
• Identify that the milestones have been created and validating they are on the critical path.
• Ensure that the budget has been sufficiently broken down.
• Review the project plan in the software to ensure it has been correctly entered and managed.

Case Study - Auditing Project Scope and Plans

Participants will be given a case study and will have to complete an in-depth audit of the scope document and project plan. They will develop recommendations and present these to the other teams.

Audit the Management of Project Issues and Changes

• Understand the issues around the on-going execution of the project plan
• Examine the project in order to identify how issues have been managed.
• Identify whether or not Project Changes have been managed correctly.

Case Study - Auditing Project Change

Participants will review a project in crisis. They will identify the process required to ensure the correct management of change on this project.

Complete the in-depth Project Audit

• Hold individual research interviews with the Project Sponsor, Project Manager and Project Team members in order to identify the past, current and future issues, concerns, challenges and opportunities.
• Conduct individual research interviews with stakeholders including vendors, suppliers, contractors, other project internal and external resources and selected customers.
• Identify and determine the expectations of all stakeholders regarding the project and whether or not these expectations have been met.
• Assess the issues, challenges and concerns in more depth to get to the root causes of the problems.
• Review historical and current documentation related to the project including:
  • Team Structure
  • Scope Statement
  • Business Requirements
  • Project Plan
  • Milestone Report
  • Meeting Minutes
  • Action Items
  • Risk Logs
  • Issue Logs
  • Change Logs
• Review the Project Plan to determine how the Vendor Plan has been incorporated into the overall project plan.
• Review the Project Quality Management and the Product Quality Management to identify the issues, concerns and challenges in the overall management of the project and to identify the opportunities that can be realized through improvements to the attention of project and product quality.
• Identify the Lessons Learned that can improve the performance of other future projects within the organization.

Conduct an in-depth Risk Assessment

• Review the project's risk assessment to identify whether contingencies and preventative measures have been identified and managed or whether the project has been managed through crisis management.
• Undertake an in-depth risk assessment
  • Identify the Risks
  • Prioritize the Risks
  • Assess the Risks
  • Develop Responses to the Risk
  • Develop Preventative Measures
  • Develop Mitigation Plans

Case Study - Conducting a Risk Assessment on a Project

Participants will complete a detailed risk management process on the process of auditing a project. They will identify the challenges of undertaking a project audit and how to overcome these challenges.

Analyze the project audit information

• Compile and analyze the information collected from all of the interviews.
• Compile and analyze the information collected from the project documentation.
• Identify the issues, concerns and challenges presented through the review of the Project Quality Management and Product Quality Management plans and isolating the opportunities that can be realized.
• Identify all of the project's issues, concerns and challenges.

Report on the project audit and gain commitment to implement the recommendations

• Create a report and recommendations that identifies all of the project's opportunities that can be realized by implementing the report's action steps.
• Identify the Lessons Learned that can improve the performance of future projects within the organization.
• Identify how Lessons Learned will be transferred to Knowledge Retention.
• Develop the report and recommendations based on the findings.
• Present the detailed report and recommendations including the Road Map to get future projects to the "next level" of performance.

Call : +6 (082) 287 737

E-mail : kevin@cia-global.com

• Project Risk Management
• Risk-Based Auditing
• Stakeholder Management
• Certified Associate in Project Management, CAPM®
• Business Continuity Management & Planning
• More other Business Management Training Courses