It’s the time of year for project sponsors to start asking: “What exactly have you done this year?” If you’re less than happy about entering 2009 with your project in a bit of a state, consider asking a colleague to run a peer review on your work.
A peer review is really an informal audit. It’s the chance for someone else to cast their eyes over your progress and approach and give you their feedback.
This is valuable because:
- Once you are working on a project you are often too close to the detail to be able to impartially comment on what is going well and what isn’t.
- It keeps you honest: it’s easy to justify to yourself why you don’t have time to update your project initiation document, but it’s much harder to justify that to someone else.
- A peer review can point out some useful things to improve or tackle, which overall will make your job much easier.
So, what are you asking your colleague to look at? This will depend on the size of the project. If it’s a large project with a huge budget running over a year or more you cannot expect a superficial peer review to uncover all the issues, so it is much better to focus on one or two areas where you know you struggle. Pick risk management, or financial tracking, or your communications plan, for example. Ask them to look for:
- Things that you are doing well: this is useful feedback so you can keep doing it
- Things that they would do differently: you can discuss if you want to adopt their method
- Things that you are not doing at all that you should be doing
You can see from this list that you need to ask someone with equal if not more experience in project management than you have. I may have the opportunity to write about mentoring later, but for now, if you have one your mentor is the perfect choice. Otherwise opt for a senior project manager or someone in the Programme or Portfolio Office.
Talk with them about what you are doing, show them any relevant documentation and let them draw their own conclusions. Agree how you want to receive feedback. A one-page report? An informal discussion over coffee? This isn’t a formal process so you can decide on something that works well for both of you.
The main thing to remember is that they should give you feedback that you can act on. It isn’t any good hearing that you are fabulous at everything. Aim to come out of the peer review with three or four things that you can do differently or start doing. Use the experience of the people in your team – and their fresh pair of eyes on problems you have probably lived with for a while – to improve what you do. And don’t forget to return the favour!
Key Tip
If you think things are going astray on your project but you can’t put your finger on it, get someone else to show you where!
Want to know more? Listen to Cornelius Fitchner’s interview with me on the subject of peer reviews for the Project Management Podcast.