Project reviews are a necessary evil. Well, that’s how some people see them.

However, reviews are an essential part of assurance in and around projects. They are – or should be – just a part of everyday project management.

In this talk, I will help you understand why we need reviews, the different types of review, how to make reviews effective, and how reviews fit with other forms of assurance.

I will refer to APM’s published guidance on reviewing projects, and will give insights from around 30 years of experience working in project risk management and assurance. Whether you are ever subject to project reviews, carry our project reviewers yourself, have responsibility for planning reviews, or a customer of project reviews, this talk is for you.

These days, all projects are subject to reviews from time to time. Sometimes, they are routine (like gate reviews), sometimes they’re a health check because someone is worried about the project, and sometimes they are because the project is going (or has gone!) horribly wrong.

As project professionals, we’re not only subject to project reviews but we will be on occasion called upon to be involved in carrying out a project review. Indeed, in some organisations, involvement in peer reviews of projects in other areas of that organisation are an expectation of the job.

For such a short term, ‘project reviews’ covers a broad range of activity, and has context to a broad range of stakeholders.

Often, the timing and content of reviews are laid down in an organisation's project management and assurance frameworks. For example, gate reviews usually follow a very clearly defined set of lines of enquiry, and quality reviews are often heavily compliance oriented. But things like peer reviews, and reviews carried out by Internal Audit, are not well defined; the process for those reviews may be well-defined but not the content.

All of this ambiguity and variation in project reviews can be rather bewildering to project teams, who will often not be aware of the ‘big picture’ of assurance in and around projects.

The talk will cover the things you need to think about when planning or executing a project review, for example:

• Who is it for?
• Why do they want it?
• When should it be done?
• How do I know what to include?
• What happens after the review?

I’ll also talk about what makes reviews most effective, what the different types of review are and how to select the best type, who should carry them out, and how different types of review relate to each other and to other forms of assurance.

For further information and to book your place please visit the APM website.