We have a habit of getting in our own way, don’t we? David Courtney Boyle, author and economist, writes, “[T]he human factor is regarded as a pernicious source of error. People mess things up. They get ill, have tantrums, and they make the most humungous mistakes.” You simply can’t quantify people. There will always be uncertainty; we don’t know how they understand, how they interpret, what their levels of fear or comfort are. People are a project’s biggest obstacle. But as Boyle adds, “human beings are also the only real source of success and the only source of genuine change.” Project reviews allow us to continually check on teams, to take their pulse – and hopefully prevent a few tantrums all around.

When people hear “project review,” they tend to think they’ve done something wrong (or that someone thinks they’ve done something wrong). As a result, individuals and teams can get defensive. But reviews can, and should, be an opportunity to take a quick step back and ask a few vital questions, including:

• What are we doing well?
• What aren’t we doing as well as we could be?
• What can we do to make ourselves do even better? What do we need to make this possible?
• What three things have we learned?
• On a scale of 1 to 5, how successful are we at this point?
• What two or three things do we need to change immediately in order to stay, or get, on track?

Reviews don’t have to be painful; they don’t even have to be something formerly regarded as a “review”. This is a matter of semantics. If “review” shuts people down, call it a meeting, call it morning coffee. On one project, we had our PMs and team leads meet at the beginning of each day, briefly, to talk about issues they were encountering and/or tasks with which they might need assistance.

The goal of these types of meetings is not to solve the problem but to introduce it, to get it onto the table. It may be that there is someone in the meeting who can help. It may be that the relevant people will take the meeting offline to decide on a corrective solution or to plan further action. Whatever the case, these meetings create a smooth and efficient flow of information and can act as a pace car for the project. This is a “project review” of sorts, but it does not at all have that same negative “they’re checking up on me” type of connotation.

These types of quick, but targeted and well-run, meetings, can be held daily, and there can be a more thorough project review held quarterly so we can continue to circle back and ask those questions: What are we doing well? What can we do better? What are we learning? What do we need to change? Yes, we will still find ways to “mess” things up; we’ll still get sick and tired; we’ll still have disagreements. But we can have these and a successful project if we take that time to take stock and put into action what we have learned.