There’s an old joke that goes, “What’s an auditor? Someone who arrives after the battle and bayonets all the wounded.” Whether we are being audited by a tax agent or by an internal or external auditor at work, it can be a thoroughly nerve-wracking experience. We think this bayonet-wielding – or checklist-wielding – auditor has come in for just one reason: to find noncompliance. The only way to survive is to be perfect – so we’re all doomed! “Audit” certainly is a four-letter word in our parlance, but if we can shift that paradigm, we can start to reap some benefits beyond compliance.

Whether you refer to these “checkups” as “project reviews” or “audits,” doesn’t matter; it’s really a matter of semantics. What you really want to create with the team, including the Steering Committee, executive sponsors, project managers and work teams, is a sense that these processes are designed to make “us” – all of us – more successful. It is not to pick at details or to “catch” people if a project subsection is three days late, or a status was out of date or the Steering Committee didn’t do “X” in the last 24 hours. Instead, we ask:

• What are the important things to focus on to be successful?
• And, more importantly, once this project is complete, how do we ensure future projects are more successful?

Reviews are a tool: a way of thinking. When teams take something that is perceived as a negative and turn it around, it can have remarkable benefits. It’s not a penalty; it is an opportunity for feedback. How are we doing? What are we going to take away from this project? What are we doing really well? What are we doing that we can apply to other projects?

What ends up happening is that you create a set of best practices based on the experiences and knowledge of the team. There is a lot of pride and ownership because people are contributing to the intellectual capital of the organization. Rather than feeling anxious or worried about “audits,” we need to generate this capital through reviews.