Activity: Project Review Authority (PRA) Project Review

The PRA Project Review is a regularly scheduled status meeting where the project progress, issues, and risks are reviewed with the Project Review Authority. The meeting is also used as a forum for raising issues that are beyond scope of the project manager's authority to resolve.

Schedule PRA Project Review Meeting

The PRA Project Review meeting is a meeting between the Project Review Authority and the project's management team (the project manager, plus the team leads for the various functional areas of the project team). The nature of the PRA as an organizational entity is defined in the Software Development Plan.

Once the attendees of the meeting have been identified, set a date/time for the meeting to take place. It is important that you provide sufficient lead time to allow the participants to review the materials that will be discussed at the meeting.

Distribute Meeting Materials

Prior to the meeting, distribute the Status Assessment (developed in the Report Status activity) to the reviewers. Make sure it is sent out sufficiently in advance of the meeting to allow the reviewers adequate time to review it.

Conduct PRA Project Review Meeting

During the meeting, the project manager presents the Status Assessment to the PRA. If the PRA has any questions about the progress of the project, these may be addressed at this time, or captured as an action item for the project management team. If any project issues are raised, the group may discuss possible solutions and assign action items to the PRA or the project management team. Any action items are captured in the Review Record for later follow-up.

The project manager's presentation should cover:

• Major project milestones that have been achieved
• Progress deviations from the targets in the Software Development Plan
• Schedule/effort variances
• Variances in spending vs. budget
• Changes in the estimated scope of work
• Variances in quality metrics
• Status of project risks:
• Any existing risks that have become realized
• Any new risks that have been identified
• Issues arising - usually these are problems that the project manager has to escalate to the PRA for resolution
• Follow-up from previous PRA Project Reviews - status of action items from previous meetings
• Upcoming project milestones

Record Minutes

At the end of the meeting, a Review Record is completed capturing any important discussions or action items, and distributed to the meeting attendees. The project manager feeds any action items assigned to the project team into the Schedule and Assign Work activity, raising Change Requests and Work Orders as appropriate.

Rational Unified Process