Whenever you come up against an issue in your project management assessment, you need to make sure not only that the issue is resolved satisfactorily, but that you learn from the experience. That, in essence, is what separates us great project managers from the plain old good ones. What happens when things keep going wrong though? Is project management assessment the way forward, or do you need to refine the process?

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. This kind of approach will do nothing but put the project manager, and indeed the team, on the back foot. This won’t add productivity or initiative.

A much more effective way of ensuring project delivery is to perform a capability test. 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. Sometimes this can be done remotely via a questionnaire, but this is often less effective, as information can be easily skewed by erroneous data.

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. Any outsourced project management assessment should be, at all points, quantifiable. 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.

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