NetAudit
MyKnowledgeMap have developed this specialist tool for project management and audits in partnership with Bryn Woodworth, an acknowledged expert in the project management field who specialises in project audits and reviews. Bryn has over 20 years experience in the project management arena and has conducted project audits for major organisations in both the public and private sectors.
Background: How organisations manage change, and thus their projects, has become a determinant of their success. Not surprisingly the auditing of projects has become more important as a tool to ensure their effective management. Many sectors, such as Financial Services and Local Authorities have become increasingly subject to external scrutiny to demonstrate effective corporate governance. These factors have led to a demand for a new type of business support tool.
Primary Aim: To create a new business support tool for the management and audit of projects of all sizes, which would support peer reviews, external assessments and self-assessments within the project audit process.
Key Challenges:
- To devise a process which could be adopted across the whole of the organisation for reviewing projects on a regular basis. This process will ensure that the approved project management approach is being implemented in a rigorous and consistent manner in line with the needs and status of the individual projects.
- NetAudit needs to highlight which projects and programmes the organisation is not managing effectively and recommend and prioritise the actions needed to bring these projects and programmes back on track.
- The navigation would need to be simple and easy to use for all involved so that training and effort in updating it could be kept to a minimum.
- The questions would need to be formulated in such a way that the responses could be supported by hard evidence, thus leading to a more accurate assessment of the projects true status.
- The system must be easy to modify if a company changes its approach and also easy to maintain.
Solution: The NetAudit process enables organisations to take control of the review process through their own trained staff and simplifies administration and implementation. Its rigorous evidence-based audit approach will stand up to scrutiny by an outside regulatory body (e.g. Financial Services Authority or the Audit Commission). The simple navigation, backed up by the comprehensive user guide, means that organisations can implement the NetAudit process quickly after the brief initial training has taken place.
The NetAudit project review Process
The structured process is built around the project investigation and scoring mechanism and comprises the following elements:
- A data collection and automated assessment tool for gathering structured data regarding individual projects
- A built in scoring method which highlights the strengths and weaknesses of individual projects
- A reporting tool which automates the production of the project review report including a prioritised schedule of recommended corrective actions
- A Management Reporting facility which enables projects to be grouped and summarised and additionally for reports based on these groupings to be produced.
The NetAudit process is very flexible and can be adapted to provide best fit to any project management approach/methodology and this flexibility means that it can be easily amended if the organisation changes its approach.
The use of traffic light symbols highlights the problem areas in a highly visual way to facilitate full comprehension of the current situation.
The rigorous process with its detailed audit trail of evidence-based assessments will stand up to the external scrutiny that many sectors are now subject to, in order to demonstrate effective Corporate Governance (An example of this would be the Comprehensive Performance Assessments undertaken by the Audit Commission on local authorities).
It can also be used as a Project Control System for small projects which may not be covered by a comprehensive project management process.
Post Implementation evaluation: Currently being implemented.