After a game, an athlete either celebrates with the team or wallows in the loss. But the next morning, the best players are watching game tapes. What did I do right? Where did I, literally or figuratively, drop the ball? What can I do differently for the next game? In business, just because a project has been completed, doesn’t mean it’s “done.” There is one more crucial step to take: the project review. Like the athlete with his game tape, we need to look more closely at what we did and didn’t do and the lessons learned for next time.

To those who have worked for months on an initiative or set of initiatives, project reviews can seem like detention on the first day of summer vacation. And, oftentimes, they’re about as effective.

Here are my best practices for teams, steering committees, and executives to ensure these reviews have value:

We can easily get lost in procedures and processes. We can become slaves to tick boxes, forms, and the way things are “supposed” to be done. The good news is that we can avoid the abyss of project reviews. They can be done expeditiously and virtually painlessly.

Project teams, executives, and steering committees can do reviews any time. In fact, they can be as quick as a half-day to a day. If there is an effective steering committee and engaged executive sponsors, these meetings can be held rather informally, as a quarterly half-day session as a way of checking back.

Whatever your goal – integrating a software system, creating a product or service, or putting on ten pounds of lean muscle – you have to stop periodically and take stock. CS Lewis wrote, “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” If you’re on the right road, a progress check will encourage you to keep going and, perhaps, help you to remain at the same pace knowing you’re moving in the right direction. A review of an ongoing project gives us that reality check, that weigh station, to see if we can proceed full speed ahead.

An interim project review can happen at virtually any point, and it is particularly useful when projects have a great deal of complexity, a large number of stakeholders, or political uncertainty associated with them. What makes these reviews so beneficial to project teams and stakeholders?

Author C. Northcote Parkinson wrote, “The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything himself.” Paperwork is the bane of all existence, it’s true. We have our work. And then we have the paperwork. It’s like having a great dinner at home. You eat. And then you have the dishes. We see a lot of project managers who are so busy working that the paperwork gets left by the wayside. While there is some that is extraneous, I’m going to make a case for this necessary evil – and say it’s not so evil at all.

Some projects are doomed by insufficient budgets, unyielding schedules, lack of senior buy-in, lack of user-adoption, or technical failures. Some projects are doomed because of their project managers. Most projects fail, or are in danger of failing, because of people problems. Working on a few people skills, then, can help increase the odds of success for projects big and small.

An ineffective project manager demonstrates these behaviors:

• Insufficient Communication. What I often see is managers taking a lot of information in, but giving back very little to the team. They cannot clearly articulate what they’re doing, where they’re going, or what their objectives are. A project that is not clearly defined, and a team that does not have a good understanding of their roles and responsibilities, starts ten paces behind. Most of the time, it is difficult to catch up.