Health checks and reviews

"Much of senior management involvement in projects is knowing when to act and what action to take. To do that effectively, management must know what the status of the project is."

It is easy for governance groups responsible for the conduct of complex, dynamic projects and programmes to become lost in the detail. They lose visibility of the critical aspects which will determine whether the project investment will be a success.

CITI provides expert advice at steering/sponsor level, and deploy well-tested models and tools, delivered through interventions such as health checks, project initiation workshops, project reviews and assurance studies. These are analysed for sources of potential failure, using trend analysis and root cause of failure analyses, and lead to recommendations for immediate and future management actions, together with possible changes to policies and/or processes.

In the case of catastrophic project and programme failure, we also carry out ‘forensic’ reviews, identifying sources, root causes and responsibilities. The purpose is to get ‘closure’, and allow the organisation to recover, moving forward with renewed confidence, leaving behind the ‘grief’' that these experiences can create.

Our clients turn to us with many concerns; typically you ask for our help to:

• Assure that a project or programme has been set up correctly
• Clarify for the sponsor the status of a project or programme, giving confidence in progress made
• Provide independent evidence on the root cause of failure with recommendations to prevent their recurrence
• Support risk workshops to identify sources of potential failure, and identify immediate remedial actions
• Give confidence that management actions taken are appropriate
• Prevent recurrence of identified underlying systemic failures
• Recover residual value from a failed project

The techniques and services we develop our tailored solution from include:

Consulting services and tools:

• Project initiation workshops
• Health checks
• Project surgeries
• Stage gate reviews
• Post implementation reviews
• Forensic analysis & expert witness
• Project audits
• Programme assurance reviews
• Programme management consultancy
• Project management consultancy
• Strategy implementation planning process and tool kit
• Workshop facilitation

Courses and tailored learning solutions, covering areas such as:

• How to run project initiation workshops
• How to conduct project health checks
• Project success through people
• Monitoring and control, including using earned value management
• Stakeholder engagement