{"id":19489,"date":"2023-05-29T19:10:16","date_gmt":"2023-05-29T13:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cigniti.com\/blog\/?p=19489"},"modified":"2024-02-20T16:51:54","modified_gmt":"2024-02-20T11:21:54","slug":"five-effective-ways-performing-periodic-project-hygiene-checks-successful-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cigniti.com\/blog\/five-effective-ways-performing-periodic-project-hygiene-checks-successful-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Ways To Act Periodic Project Hygiene Checks in Business"},"content":{"rendered":"
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Why are IT projects unsuccessful? What could be the reasons for failure? Project failures can be due to many reasons and may vary from several issues ranging from trivial to significant blockers during execution. These impact budgets, deadlines, goals, and not meeting the program\u2019s success criteria or definition of done.<\/p>\n
According to a\u202fPwC study\u202fof over 10,640 projects, only a tiny portion of companies \u2013 2.5% to be exact \u2013 completed 100% of their assignments successfully.<\/p>\n
A project hygiene check assesses a quantitative decision measure at any point during the project life cycle. This evaluation is a pivotal tool for decision-makers, providing immediate findings that guide planning and execution. Similar to how personal hygiene in food safety promotes long-lasting health, a hygiene check in business is equally necessary. Much like maintaining personal well-being, regular project hygiene checks offer opportunities for improvement, ensuring early detection of issues and optimization opportunities. This proactive approach significantly enhances the likelihood of project success by addressing concerns promptly and fostering continuous improvement.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s known that correcting an issue costs many times more than preventing it. Conducting hygiene project checks earlier \u2013 shifting left, as they say \u2013 helps capture bugs during the early phases of the program and cost-effectively fix them.<\/p>\n
So, how does the project team know if the project is healthy or sick? Here are five critical contributors that the project teams must evaluate very often to see the hygiene of the project. Perform the following hygiene project check and assess periodically to increase the chances of a successful project.<\/p>\n
Ensure that the project team and stakeholders understand how the project contributes to the business strategy and that the priority\/value is well understood and communicated. Teams associated with the project must clearly understand the program\u2019s vision, mission, objective, and approach throughout the project life cycle.<\/p>\n
It is critical to perform a risk analysis. The purpose is to identify and rate the likelihood of occurrence, the potential impacts, and actions to mitigate. Not performing risk analysis may lead to the following:<\/p>\n
Project teams must track, analyze, and report the progress to elevate transparency and accountability. Periodic project progress tracking against the plan helps detect problems early, which may avoid cost and time overruns. The systematic monitoring of the project allows teams to identify blockers ahead on the critical path activities. A simple and effective way to track progress is using dashboards and Gantt charts.<\/p>\n
Involve the team<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Every project team aims to deliver a successful project. With that in mind, it is essential to involve the team members in establishing the goals leading to greater responsibility within the team to meet them.<\/p>\n Create Good Goals<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Goals must be clear, realistic, and measurable. Ask the following questions to yourself while establishing the goals.<\/p>\n Usage of Reporting Tools<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Using a project management tool to track progress is beneficial rather than attempting to calculate percentage completion. Multiple software tools will give accurate information in just a few clicks.<\/p>\n Establish Team connects \u2013 Schedule regular connects with your team throughout the project\u2019s life. Check on the goals that you have created for your teams. Do not wait until the goal reaches its deadline; it will be too late to correct if something is built incorrectly. Taking a proactive approach instead of being reactive is beneficial.<\/p>\n As a part of hygiene checks, it\u2019s always crucial that the project team works towards assigning best-visible-best-fit instead of first-available-first-fit resources. This can happen through the ability to forecast requirements and develop a strategy to plan, allocate, and utilize the resources and competencies effectively.<\/p>\n Mapping resources into the defined plan is crucial as projects require specific expertise in specific areas of delivery and schedule, depending on the milestones being delivered or the given phase of the project. Project teams should mandate to review the resource plan very often during the project lifecycle.<\/p>\n Transparency is the key to project success, and that comes through effective communication. It ensures the project team and stakeholders stay aligned with project goals and understands their expectations. It helps build trust and allows the team to work together from inception to closure of the project. Project management software tools clarify communications, keep the progress and impediments transparent, and act as a \u201csingle source of truth\u201d for project teams and stakeholders. They help:<\/p>\n Further Key Hygiene Evaluation Points for Projects<\/strong><\/p>\n The IT industry has evolved and become more complex in the last decade, and so have our projects. With the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, the project teams may need to catch up on a few checks and balances, leading to project failures (in scope\/budget\/timeline). We can analyze and assess the project during the life cycle through proper hygiene checks. This helps us identify best practices and improve the overall project performance. The project team can easily see and communicate progress and success through periodic project hygiene checks are in place.<\/p>\n By implementing the above with our customers, we bring high visibility to the stakeholders on overall project progress through status reporting and project management tools. We help them overcome challenges by identifying risks and providing options that empower them to make timely decisions. We have established different communication channels and team connections to keep everyone abreast of the actual state of the project. Finally, we also ensure that the right resources are allocated to the project. All these hygiene check activities have helped us to deliver the best results.<\/p>\n Cigniti has a robust Process Asset Library with artifacts related to processes, checklists, guidelines, and templates that are used to enable efficient Project Hygiene Checks. These artifacts include Software Engineering Process \u2013 Agile and DevOps<\/a>, Risk and Opportunity Management Process, Risk Management Checklist, Risk and Opportunity Management Guidelines, Agile Sprint Dashboard and Jira Dashboard, and Weekly, Daily, and Monthly Status Reports. Furthermore, in collaboration with PMO, we identified and deployed the right skilled resources to the project.<\/p>\n\n
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