Projects are planned, but for those plans to achieve their goals and for future plans to be more successful, a project review is necessary. Any project manager with even a little experience knows that rarely are plans executed without a hitch, which is why a project review process is an essential part of the monitoring and control phase of the project life cycle.
That doesn’t mean there’s only one way to do a project review. We define the term and list the types before going into how to conduct a project management review. There’s even a free project review template for Excel that readers can download and use. But we’ll show why project management software helps deliver a more efficient and effective project review.
What Is a Project Review?
A project review is a formal assessment of a project’s progress, performance and outcomes at a specific point in its life cycle. It’s used to evaluate progress to ensure that the project is on track with respect to its schedule, budget and deliverables. It does this by identifying issues, such as challenges, risks or obstacles that might hinder the project’s success.
The process includes collecting input from stakeholders, team members and sponsors to understand the project from different perspectives. This plus monitoring, helps project managers check if the project aligns with its objectives and organizational goals and meets stakeholder expectations.
All this work serves the purpose of making more informed decisions by providing data and insights that support better future actions. These can include adjusting the project plan or reallocating resources. These lessons learned improve the planning and execution of current and future projects.
Project management software helps to gather this data. ProjectManager is award-winning project and portfolio management software that collects real-time data to give project managers transparency into project progress and performance. For a high-level overview of one or multiple projects, use the dashboards, which automatically collect live data and display time, cost, workload and more in easy-to-read graphs and charts. It’s like an instant status report whenever you need it. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.
