Project Management Tips and Techniques:
Use Milestone Reviews to Validate Your Project is Still On-Track
Tom Mochal

Each month, Tom Mochal, President of TenStep, Inc. presents project management tips and techniques for planning and managing a project. TenStep, Inc. has a comprehensive, scalable project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com), as well as a project lifecycle process called LifecycleStep (www.LifecycleStep.com). Tom has also published a popular book called Lessons in Project Management that can be purchased at  www.TenStep.com.  Pipeline readers receive 20% off any TenStep or LifecycleStep purchase by entering the coupon code of "Pipeline" in their purchase.

The basic questions tend to be similar from phase to phase, and even from project to project. Therefore, they tend to be good candidates for a checklist. Any final reviews at this time tend to be Quality Assurance related since they are focused more on the processes completed rather than reviewing any specific deliverables. The specific deliverable reviews should have been completed earlier.

Obtaining formal approval to proceed is important for a couple of reasons.

• The team needs to make sure that it does not get ahead of itself. For instance if you begin the Design Phase without having the requirements finalized, you may end up with a design that does not fully meet the client needs, or you may have to spend effort and money on rework.

• You need to ensure that you still have sponsorship, budget and resources. Taking a checkpoint and obtaining formal approval to proceed will ensure that the project is still valid and that you expect that you will have the resources you need to complete the remainder of the work. If you proceed without formal approval, you may end up wasting resources on work that no longer has a high-enough priority to proceed.

The approval to proceed usually takes place in a meeting with the project manager, sponsor and other senior stakeholders. The agenda of the meeting would be something like the following:

• Validate the purpose of the meeting

• Review Exit Criteria for the phase
  • Formally sign off on any of the major deliverables not yet approved
  • Review budget
  • Review any outstanding work from this phase

• Review entry criteria for the next phase
  • Validate estimates for the remainder of the work
  • Validate that the business case for the project is still valid
  • Validate resource availability for the remainder of the project
  • Validate that sponsorship is still in place
  • Validate the high-level plan for the next phase

• Obtain official approval to proceed

The official approval to proceed basically means that all work done up to this point is okay and the team can concentrate now on the work associated with the next phase or next milestone.
 

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