Making The Most Of Your Project Management Assessment

Very often we come up against problems when dealing with project management assessment. Mostly, this is something that can be dealt with perfectly effectively with a little bit of real objectivity. This isn't the kind of objectivity that you often get with in house teams, so should you be thinking about outsourcing it? Does the extra money make sense? Is it going to benefit your team and business? Is a solid project management assessment even the right thing for you to do? These are all questions that need to be answered before you even think about outsourcing, as there are plenty of ways you can maximize your project management assessment and make sure it's not a wasted effort.

Often, when project delivery goes astray, capability is brought into question, and the project managers are beaten with the don't-do-it-again stick. This form of assessment, if you can call it that, has two major drawbacks. It not only solves none of the issues that arose, but it puts the important role of project managers on the back foot, and more often than not afraid to be proactive.

A capability test is a far more effective way of doing it. This is basically a gauge of how the project unit is responding to the task or objective. This will often involve talks with key and random personnel, as well as maturity assessments. Very often this is done via questionnaire. This isn't always the best way to do it though.

Any kind of project management assessment is often better dealt with out-of-house, and the objectivity it can provide is sometimes worth a thousand in-house studies. Quantifiability is the key word here. If your results aren't quantifiable, they're all but useless. Without hard data and accurate interpretation, the whole system falls down, with anyone being able to interpret anything from the data. Be aware of this, as statistics of any kind can be a tricky thing to interpret objectively.

Once you have completed your project management assessment, you should look to take the silver lining from every situation. Once the to-do's have been done, it's time to ensure that everyone involved in the project, be it large or small, understands their role, and how they can improve. Of course, much of this boils down to your management skills, but understand that even the largest project can be delivered overdue, or to a sub par standard, simply because of the disgruntlement or lack of understanding of one person in the group. Project management assessments are an excellent time for you to communicate with the team or individuals dealing with the project.

One final point, regarding project management assessment: if you're looking at them as a way to scapegoat a group or individual, you're making a mistake. The process of an accurate and telling assessment is far to long and involved for you to use it as that kind of tool. Indeed, many will find that the results come back to haunt them later.