Checklist · Project Management

Project Health Check

An honest assessment of whether a project is actually on track — the schedule question people avoid, whether the plan reflects reality, dependency and decision latency, and the signals that predict trouble months early.

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Run this monthly, or whenever something feels wrong and nobody can say what. It is written to surface the things a status report smooths over.

Project: _______________ Assessed by: _______________ Date: _______

1. The direct questions#

[ ] Is the current end date one you would personally bet on? yes / no
[ ] If no, has anyone been told? yes / no — when: _______
[ ] Does the plan reflect what is actually happening, or what was agreed months ago?
[ ] Would the team give the same answers as the project manager?
[ ] Has any deadline moved in the last quarter, and was that visible?

🔴 The most common failure in project reporting is not lying. It is a series of individually reasonable "we will catch up next sprint" judgements, none of which is ever escalated, until the gap is too large to absorb.

2. Scope#

[ ] Baseline scope is written down and findable
[ ] Changes since baseline are recorded with their cumulative impact
[ ] Cumulative schedule impact of approved changes: ____
[ ] Out-of-scope list exists and has been used to decline something
[ ] Nobody is adding work informally to individual team members

3. Progress#

[ ] Progress measured by completed, accepted work — not by effort spent
[ ] "90% done" claims older than two weeks investigated
[ ] Testing is progressing alongside build, not queued at the end
[ ] Integration has been attempted, not deferred
[ ] The riskiest work was done early, not left until last

The oldest item still "in progress": ____ days

Deferred integration and deferred testing are the two most reliable predictors of a late project, because both hide accumulated problems until the point where there is no time to absorb them.

4. The queues#

[ ] Average time to get a decision: ____
[ ] Average wait on an external dependency: ____
[ ] Items currently blocked: ____ — oldest blocked for ____ days
[ ] Environments available when needed
[ ] Anyone waiting on a single named person for more than one thing

Delay usually lives in queues rather than in the work. If the team is waiting a week for decisions, no amount of delivery improvement changes the outcome.

5. People#

[ ] Team members are on this project the share of time that was planned
[ ] Key-person dependency identified: _______________
[ ] Someone else could continue if that person left tomorrow
[ ] Overtime is not being used routinely to hold the date
[ ] Turnover since start: ____

Sustained overtime is a schedule problem being paid for with quality, and it shows up two months later as defects.

6. Quality signals#

[ ] Defect count trending down, not up, as the end approaches
[ ] No large untested area
[ ] Non-functional requirements have been tested, not just functional ones
[ ] Known defects list exists, with severity agreed
[ ] Technical debt taken deliberately, and recorded

7. Governance#

[ ] Sponsor is engaged — attended the last two reviews
[ ] Risks reviewed in the last fortnight, with overdue mitigations chased
[ ] Decisions are being recorded
[ ] Status reporting matches what the team would say
[ ] Bad news reaches the sponsor without being softened at each level

When did we last tell the sponsor something they did not want to hear? _______

If the answer is "never", the reporting chain is filtering, and the sponsor is making decisions on a version of reality that has been improved on the way up.

Verdict#


Confidence in the end date	high / medium / low
The one thing most likely to derail this
What I would escalate today
Action, owner, date

A health check that produces no action is a status meeting. Leave with one thing that changes.

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