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Unit 9: Evaluation and Termination

be penalized in some way. If you go around auditing people, you can be sure they will hide from Notes
you anything they don’t want you to know, and it is those very things that could help the
company learn and grow.
As Dr. W. Edwards Deming has pointed out in his book, Out of the Crisis, there are two kinds of
organizations in this world today—those that are getting better and those that are dying. An
organization that stands still is dying. It just doesn’t know it yet. The reason? The competition is
not sitting by idly. It is doing new things, some of which may be better than yours. If you aren’t
improving, you will be passed by, and soon you won’t have a market. The same is true of every
part of an organization. You can’t sub-optimize, improving just manufacturing. You have to
improve every department, and that includes how you run projects. In fact, good project
management can give you a real competitive advantage, especially in product development. If
you are sloppy in managing your projects, you don’t have good control of development costs.
That means that you have to either sell a lot of product or charge large margins to cover your
development costs so that the project is worth doing in the first place. If you can’t sell a lot of
widgets, then you have to charge the large margin.
If your competitor, on the other hand, has good cost control, it can charge smaller margins and
still be sure that it recovers its investment and makes money. Thus, it has a competitive advantage
over you because of its better control of project work. Additionally, in order to learn, people
require feedback, like that gained by a team from reviewing game films. The last phase of a
project should be a final process review, conducted so that the management of projects can be
improved. However, such a process review should not be conducted only at the end of the
project. Rather, process reviews should be done at major milestones in the project or every three
months, whichever comes first, so that learning can take place as the job progresses. Furthermore,
if a project is getting into serious trouble, the process review should reveal the difficulty so that
a decision can be made to continue or terminate the work. Following are some of the general
reasons for conducting periodic project process reviews. You should be able to:
1. Improve project performance together with the management of the project.
2. Ensure that quality of project work does not take a back seat to schedule and cost concerns.
3. Reveal developing problems early so that action can be taken to deal with them.
4. Identify areas where other projects (current or future) should be managed differently.

5. Keep client(s) informed of project status. This can also help ensure that the completed
project will meet the needs of the client.
6. Reaffirm the organization’s commitment to the project for the benefit of project team
members.

Notes Ideally, a project process review should be conducted by an independent examiner,
who can remain objective in the assessment of information.
9.2 Conducting the Project Process Review

Ideally, a project process review should be conducted by an independent examiner, who can
remain objective in the assessment of information. However, the process review must be conducted
in a spirit of learning, rather than in a climate of blame and punishment. If people are afraid that
they will be “strung up” for problems, then they will hide those problems if at all possible. Even
so, openness is hard to achieve. In many organizations, the climate has been punitive for so long
that people are reluctant to reveal any less-than-perfect aspects of project performance. Dr. Chris

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