PROJECT AUDITING : Executive Summary

Informed decision making is vital to keep a project on track and project auditing is the single best avenue to ensure that project stakeholders know precisely how well a project is progressing.  The intent of project audits is to ensure that the project is being managed in a predictable and transparent way keeping on schedule, within scope, and managing risks and issues (project management), that the product is developed with appropriate discovery of requirements and matures logically while keeping benefits and objectives intact (systems development), and that the product meets customer expectations (quality management). 

Project audits, put very simply, are meant to examine past activities and deliverables to ensure that the project is progressing as expected.  Project audits also review planned future activities to ensure that the proper planning, commitments, and controls are in place prior to execution of the next phase.  Audits are timed to occur at critical milestones in the project to cover appropriate phases and processes where the output from a particular phase is a requirement for the successful start of the next phase.

Using the PAG audit framework of checkpoints and reviews ensures that all project stakeholders, from executive management to business sponsors, are adequately informed of the project health at critical project milestones. 

PAG will provide pre-audit services to gather project information and prepare the project team, will conduct the scheduled audit, and will provide post-audit services to analyze audit artifacts and notes, produce an Audit Report, and follow up with project team members on items of concern or that require additional assistance or coaching as deemed necessary by the PAG.

The Audit Report to executive management will highlight any areas that are posing a risk to successful deployment and suggest action plans for mitigating those risk areas.  Subsequent audits will track and report on progress with those risk mitigation activities.