Spidel Tech Solutions, Inc. - Project Review Board

Project Review Board

Introduction

A Project Review Board will be appointed to monitor project or system incidents called a System Performance Report or (SPR) reported via the communications manager. They will use consensus to determine the best interest of the stakeholders.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to define the parameters for the operation of the Project Review Board. It is intended for review board members.

References

The references section includes documents that are applicable to the Review Board.

Outcomes

The following outcomes are expected from the Project Review Board.

All priority one SPRs are discussed and roadblocks are addressed to minimize the effort to resolving the SPR.
Priority one SPRs are initially addressed after 15 minutes of incident report if not immediately resolved by Technical Support.
Priority one SPRs that cannot be resolved in a few minutes may require a short design cycle to resolve.
Project and development managers are responsible to determine if the reported problem warrants such a heroic effort.
Other SPRs are referred to the person who is most likely to be responsible for how the SPR is to be resolved.
For example a problem with faulty data may be referred to a clerk or analyst to correct it in the database.
Milestones or deliverables in jeopardy are examined to find ways to get them back on track.

Reallocating resources and expediting process issues are commonly used tools.

Composition

The following table identifies the composition of the Project Review Board.

Role	Purpose
Project Manager	All project Managers are members of the review board to improve communication of decision rationale. Each Project Manager understands the scheduling issues in his purview. This will help them contribute to schedule resolution issues.
Development Manager	All project Development Managers are members of the review board to represent the design impact issues to problem resolution. Development Managers understand how adding resources may or may not positively effect a design outcome.
Stakeholder Advocate	A stakeholder advocate for each use case is identified at the beginning of the project. Each advocate is invited to meetings where that use case will be discussed. The customer advocate is usually someone from technical support or a representative from a stakeholder group. For example the buyer may select an end user to attend meetings where the user terminal interfaces are discussed.

The Project Managers identify stakeholder advocates by encouraging stakeholder groups to select a member from among their group. Otherwise a tech support person is appointed who has recorded the most SPRs against the relevant Use Case.

Process

The following sections describe the process used by the Project Review Board.

Meetings

Review Board Meetings are scheduled based on the scope of the project and the frequency of priority issues. A Board Member need only attend meetings where an SPR or project plan item relevant to their purview will be discussed. This will be made visible in the meeting agenda which will be published 24 hours before the scheduled meeting. Since the Project Review Board meetings have a regular schedule, board members will keep the time slot free in case they need to attend.

SPR

A weekly conference call is used to review outstanding problems and assign a consensus disposition. The disposition includes a priority, status and responsible person.

Status and responsible person are often obvious but priority can take some interpretation as is seen in the Project Management Plan.

Weekly conference calls are preceded with a written agenda. This allows the relevant members to be present for a scheduled part of the meeting.

The senior project manager is responsible for an agenda the tries to optimize the time of the various participants. For example grouping by product subsystem determines the participants. Assigning a reasonable timeslot allows the participants to join the call for the least amount of time.

The conference call does not have a fixed time but should usually be limited to 1-2 hours. Each outstanding priority 1 SPR should be discussed first in each conference call.

Project

A monthly face-to-face meeting is called to review the overall project status. This Project Review meeting may uncover process problems that the project management group can work to resolve. The project meeting identifies milestones that are about to slip and finds ways to eliminate or reduce the slip. The Senior project manager chairs the Project Review meeting assuring that specific task assignments are made to resolve potential and actual problems.

Between the Meetings

Board members gather source information related to SPRs in which they have a stake by reading reported SPRs and contacting authors, tech support and developers to gather creative alternatives. Persons responsible for a deliverable or milestone that is in jeopardy should be prepared to discuss with one or more review board members issues relevant to the problem.

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