7. Criteria: project planning quality

Projects are rarely one-offs. There is often an intention to develop other projects in the future or there may be a number in the pipeline at various stages of the system life cycle. And so it is important that the quality of project planning is evaluated, so, as the over-used saying goes, 'lessons can be learnt'.

Evaluation criteria for the project includes answering the questions:

Did it come in on time?

Was it on-budget?

Was the expected amount of man-hours and resources deployed?

A perfect project plan would say 'yes' to each of these questions. Indeed, if such a project happened within the company, then other project planners and management would be very keen to understand why it was such a success.

On the other hand. It is more likely that there is a 'no' amongst those questions. In which case the evaluation stage should seek to get some understanding of what the issues were.

In order to do this, there needs to be a set of evaluation criteria set out at the design phase. For example, if the criteria was to evaluate the number of man-hours spent on a project, then a tracking system needs to be in place for counting man-hours from the begining.

Also, inevitably there will be problems. These should be formally documented in a format laid down before hand so that they can be evaluated at a later stage.