Senior Management
Review is an essential part of every project. PMs need to provide the status of
various information, project health, risks and issues to senior management and audit
professionals. This is needed to seek their advice and gain their approval as
they can provide useful insights to the project based on their experience to
avoid the project from going in a wrong direction.
There are various
components of a Senior Management Review:
Project Overview
We need to provide
high-level project scope to give the Senior Managers the basic details of the
project. It is also necessary to inform them about the end result of it. It
includes Project Duration, Project Methodology, Project Cost, Contract time,
Delivery Strategy, Communication Protocol, Project Governance, Technology and
Environment used, Key Highlights and Lowlights of the Project followed by Key
Updates and Business Objectives.
Monthly Status
Dashboard
This dashboard
provides the details to our SMs about the Issues and Service Requests made by
the Customer. It informs us about how many of them have been solved (priority
wise) and how many are carried forward in the reviewing month. Here’s an
illustration:
Classification of Data
and Project Metrics
Data need to be
classified in various aspects like Priority wise or Group wise count of
incidents created and their respective resolutions. We need to establish a
trend from the existing data and compare it to that of the previous month. This
trend may include a number of Incidents created and their resolutions. To help
you further here is a visual representation:
Previous Review Action
Status and Future Action Plan
After every review,
the Senior Management provides their Insights, Feedbacks and Areas of
Improvement. Project Managers need to capture them as MoM. In the next review,
the previous feedbacks that were documented with the owner of the action item,
current status, and the tentative closure date, are also discussed. The actions
taken on them are analyzed too. The goals and tasks set for future targets are
also discussed under this forum. The team can assess the review and discuss
further if required.
Customer Feedback and
Action Taken
We need to organize
the Customer Satisfaction Survey every quarter and the feedbacks gained in
those surveys are documented for the SMR. Different areas like Communication,
Technical Capability, Timeliness and Initiatives Taken etc can be classified
and presented along with the customer ratings gained. The workable areas are
highlighted and discussed by the Senior Management so that Actions suitable to
be taken for each area can be discussed. Plotting down a Table Representation
can be helpful:
Delivery Schedule
Different deliverables
of different projects are timelined here. They are presented with their Planned
Dates, Actual Dates and Current Status. Any delays in any of the deliverables
are documented here along with the reason for the delay.
Reopened Incidents and
RCA
Often when the
Customers do not approve some of the incidents resolved, they bounce it back as
Open Incidents. There could be n-number of reasons for reopening the incidents:
the incidents being partially resolved or the Customer not approving of the
resolution. Project Managers need to analyze every reopened incident, find
their cause and provide Actions to be taken appropriately. The analysis and
action items need to be shared with Senior Management. Let’s have a look at the
graph:
KPI and SLA Meeting
The team is provided
with a set number of incidents for each quarter that need to be resolved. The
number of incidents solved is highlighted in each and every month of the
quarter along with the discrepancies in the targets if any. This is the Key Performance
Indicator of the quarter stating the work done. The same is highlighted in the
review for the Senior Management if the Service Level Agreement for the
customers is met every month.
High Level Project
Risks and Concerns
The review also talks
about the different kinds of risks involved or that may emerge later such as
Financial, Technical, Human Resource, Time and Delivery etc. The criticality of
the risks and concerns along with the ways appropriate to mitigate them are
discussed in the meeting.
Current Team Structure
The Resource
Deployment is exhibited here by showing the total number of people designated
for the Project classified as Onsite and Offshore based on their Experience
Level. This helps the Senior Management to keep a check on the ‘pyramid-like’
distribution of people in a team based on their experience. I have used a pie
chart to illustrate the same:
A Senior Management
Review is thus, a formal, structured meeting that involves top management and
takes place at regular intervals throughout the year. The sole purpose of this
review meeting is to evaluate the effectiveness of your management system,
helping you to determine its continued suitability and adequacy.
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