Auditing Projects & Project Management Processes

Hi, I’m Richard Broo from True North PNP Consulting and I want to thank you for joining me for another installment of best practices and effective project management. Today I’d like to talk with you about auditing a project or a project management process. Now, every company has projects and some degree of a project management process, but it does make sense from time to time to audit both a project and a project management process to make sure that you are eliminating costs waste in time at both of those entities.

Now I want to talk to you today about eight things that I think are benefits of auditing a project. The first is when you ordered a project or a project management process, you’re really trying to figure out what do you do very well, what don’t you do very well, and where are there areas for improvement?

In fact, immediate improvement and auditing will do that for you, whether it’s on a project or a project management process. You can confirm if you’re quality control and quality assurance processes and procedures that you put in place for the project are in fact being effective to help you develop that product or service and doing their intended function.

You can identify potential issues with regards to lack of capital, lack of human resources, anything that you need in order to complete the project. If you audit a project or project management process, you’ll be able to see ahead of time if you’re heading for danger in that area.

Now you have outside vendors. These are the folks that you’re bringing in from the outside to help you. They have deliverables. Are those deliverables being brought in on time, on budget to the quality standards that you’re asking for? Also when you audit, you can audit to state, local and governmental standards, environmental health and safety standards. Every product has some degree of that, every service as some degree of that. Are those, in fact, being met throughout the development process for this project or service? And then, we have the topic of risks. Every project has risks. I don’t care what size project it is, I don’t care what type of project it is. There’s going to be a risk.

And so if you have a risk register, you can audit that risk register to say, do I have all my potential risks identified in a proper response? Should they occur? But you can also identify new risks and add those to the risk register so that should they occur, you have a response for them.

And finally, there’s always non-value added tasks that crept their way into a project. Things that eat your money, things that eat your time, things that eat away at the effectiveness of your resources. Auditing helps you understand what they are, and once you understand what they are and get to the root of them, you can eliminate them.

So there’s a lot of benefits to auditing a project or a project management process. And I encourage you to do that because if you do that, you will reduce costs, you will reduce time, and you will eliminate waste. And that’s very important to be effective in project management. Again, I’m Richard Broo, my company’s truenorthpmpconsulting.com and until we see each other again, be good, be safe, and be effective in project management. Take care.