PROJECT AUDITING : Understanding The Client's Needs
To ensure the project planning achieves the intended goal the basic phased milestones must be satisfied. Project phases can take many forms, the following being based on the Project Management Institute standard project management life cycle (PMLC).
Phased milestones can also be mapped over other frameworks. This is how the Oracle EBS project life cycle is laid out in relation to the PMLC above.
Initiation / Design Phase - Ensuring that the revised scope is well defined and meets a concrete set of requirements borne out in each phase of deployment, ensuring objectives for the business to deliver specific benefits are maintained throughout project to deployment, and confirming that deliverables are clearly defined and specific tasks are identified to produce those deliverables.
Planning / Definition Phase - A thorough validation of current design is conducted against agreed upon business benefits for what the end-state system is to deliver and that deliverables (tasks) are clearly identified and appropriately scheduled to meet objectives for each phase of the deployment. Business processes have been sufficiently mapped and gaps identified and addressed.
Execution / Elaboration Phase - Detailed design has been translated thoroughly into detailed technical requirements for development. The business has produced a high level change management plan for deployment which addresses communication, training, financial and other systems transition, and documentation. IT technical team has developed test plans for system integration (link, load, end-to-end), performance, conversion and UAT testing and that a detailed implementation and cutover plan has been produced. The business has partnered with IT to develop test scripts for User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of their business processes, SOX compliance (if applicable), and application enhancements.
Execution / Build Phase - Technical design has been developed into enhanced application modules that have been rigorously unit tested and are loaded to the final production instance which is tested for configuration acceptance. IT conducts thorough system integration, performance and conversion testing in preparation for UAT.
Execution / Transition Phase - The final system configuration is signed off for each module, interdependent system readiness is confirmed, detailed cutover plan is approved, and UAT is conducted and signed off. Change management (training, transition, communication, resource management, Finance operations) and implementation plans (production support, transition, cutover, documentation, systems verification) are executed. The new system goes live with negligible impact to business continuity.
Close / Production Phase - Post Go-live cutover support is implemented through warrantee period. Project is closed out with lessons learned.
Interaction with the project team across the phases is not distinct or cleanly separated between project phases. Process activity within the phases overlaps and in many ways tasks interact with interdependence between the phases. Detailed design definition precedes the elaboration into technical requirements which precedes the actual build. Often the process is iterative in nature requiring the team to revisit defined business requirements and work through the details again as technical solutions are determined and finalized. This iterative approach is common where customization of an application is involved.
This graph represents how the level of process interaction might look over the life cycle of a project. Audits must be both backward looking and forward looking to understand the depth of how these phases are interacting at a particular critical project milestone.
