Reviews and Audits
It is commonly agreed that when you put together a high-fidelity music system, that there is a need for good loudspeakers. However, it is also commonly known that no matter how good the speakers, they cannot compensate for poor quality source material or poor reproduction in earlier stages of the sound system. Similarly, no matter how good your developers, they cannot compensate if the requirements and the design they have to work with are not up to standard.
The objective of holding a review or audit of a project is to ensure that the whole process is delivering to a standard that will ensure the end result is both what is needed to support your business, and has the appropriate qualities to ensure the end result is delivered as economically as possible.
Each review is tailored to the requirements of your project. Prior to the clinic, your review consultant contacts you to discuss the project and ensure that he or she has the correct understanding of the project’s goals. The review/audit itself looks at the overall process and the deliverables that it is producing. Using his extensive experience, your reviewer will be able to highlight areas where the process is not as effective or efficient as it could be, and identify deliverables that are not pulling their weight when seen against project effort.
Reviews and audits have been used in the past by various clients to:
- Verify the context of the work area to be studied
- Determine if the process and data models are useful, and if they are being used correctly when interacting with stakeholders
- Review the estimates for the project
- Inspect the quality reviews and ensure that they are using their review time effectively
- Review the interfaces between projects
- Review the systems architecture map
- Plan the best way to identify reusable design components
- Inform managers about measurable deliverables
However, there is no set agenda for reviews and audits – they can be whatever your project needs.
When are reviews and audits useful?
There are two situations that benefit from reviews and audits: when you suspect that something is wrong and you want identify the problem before any serious damage is done; and when you are about to start a new activity and want to take a checkpoint on the project’s effectiveness before progressing. Clients have requested reviews:- At the beginning of a project
- During the definition of the essential requirements
- At the transition from analysis to design
- During software and organizational design
- During implementation
- As an end-of-project review
Why use a consultant?
As outside consultants, we can bring you several benefits. Our experience gained by working on a large number of projects means that we are able to provide hands-on experience to augment your project team. Our project experience means that we can probably identify problems before they arise. As outsiders, our fresh viewpoint means that we look at your project in a different way from the project team who are caught up in the day-to-day pressure of system development.