Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning we get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you. Please read our disclosure for more info.
Last Updated on September 20, 2021 by Work In My Pajamas
When managing a project, there are multiple points in time when you should stop and check what you’ve done so far. Naturally, you’re expected to do this at the end of it as well but, in order for the project to be successful, a timely evaluation is crucial. The exact evaluation strategies will depend on several factors: your budget, your client, as well as the scope of the project and its aims.
In principle, whatever you achieve will have to be compared to what has been set as a goal at the very beginning of your work. You will have to regularly assess what has been accomplished together with your employees, clients, management and basically everyone involved in the project. Here are a few pieces of advice on how to do this.
Schedule
Before you start a project, an accurate schedule will have to be determined together with the client, and sticking to it is essential if you are to maintain the image of a serious and credible team that can deliver the results. However, sometimes it’s very hard to give a precise estimate, because not everything is always under your control and there are problems that can’t be predicted. If the schedule is starting to stretch and you realize you’re behind the clock, you need to check whether it’s due to external factors or it’s your team’s fault.
Of course, setbacks are rarely the responsibility of the whole team – you’ll have to recognize which part of the team is the weak link and see what you can do about it. If you realize that, as a manager, you made an estimate that was simply unrealistic, then you must reassess it and bear the responsibility for this mistake. Don’t worry – it’s not the end of the world, since it’s impossible to get everything flawlessly right in advance, especially on large-scale projects, but if there’s a problem it’s critical to detect it in time, inform the client and make a decision on desired future steps as soon as possible.
Quality
Of course, just following your schedule perfectly won’t necessarily mean you’re doing a good job. If the quality of the job done is below par, you have a problem. That’s why you need to re-evaluate regularly not just whether you’re behind the schedule, but also if every segment of the project has been done properly. If you realize that you can’t do everything right at the pace that was determined at the beginning of the project, you’ll have to stretch your schedule. This is for the best for both you and the client – having a product a few days or a few weeks later is much better than having a bad quality product.
Cost Evaluation
At the very outset, you’ll have to have a detailed evaluation of costs for every step and every segment of a project. Checking if all your costs are at the predicted levels regularly is absolutely crucial, because having an initial small discrepancy between the actual and estimated expenses can get out of control over time and become a big problem. So if you’re starting to stretch your schedule or you simply failed to predict some expenses before the beginning of the project, you’ll have to stretch or restructure the budget.
The client usually won’t be too eager to spend more than initially anticipated, so you’ll have to find ways to redistribute the money and make sure everything is covered. It’s essential that you recognize there’s a budget problem as soon as it appears and to find a solution to this promptly.
Ask Those Who Are Involved
One of the ways to determine whether the project, finished or unfinished, has been done well, is to check what those who are involved think about it. Try to get some feedback from them in terms of how they feel about this project, what they see as its biggest problems, what they think could have been done differently, and taking some advice from them on how to make it better. Doing this a few times during the project can be very helpful. This survey should include people in the management involved in the project, too.
Ask Other People
If you are unsure whether it is a good idea to ask people who are not involved in the project about its success, don’t hesitate. Sometimes, those who work on a project can’t have a realistic opinion on its accomplishments, and having a third-person perspective on how you did is vital. If you’re making a product, have people test it and tell you what they think, and if you’re working on a different kind of a project, tell people what your goals and your results were and let them express their thoughts on this. There are simple online paid surveys that can be of help. You can also organize live focus groups and actual paper-and-pencil surveys, but these traditional surveys are much more expensive and processing the collected data is much slower in this case.
The key to get the most out of a project is to re-evaluate it as frequently and as systematically as possible. Never ignore signs of a possible trouble. Whenever you detect a problem, no matter how small and trivial it seems, don’t turn a blind eye to it, but react immediately before those problems grow and hurt your project significantly.
