Question

What is project auditing? What is the purpose of project auditing? What topics are contained in a project Audit? When is the best time to administer a project audit?

Answer 1

Project auditing can be defined as an evaluation of the project management in terms of its methodology, its procedures, its documents, its techniques, its budgets, its properties, its expenses and its level of completion to ensure that the project management standards are fulfilled.

The main purpose of a project audit is to ensure that the project is meeting the management standards through evaluations and investigations. A project audit acts as a quality assurance of project management, products and services, identification of the business risk and improve performance of the project team

The topics covered are assessment of the quality of project management; purposefulness and quality of project documentation; project management tools and the correspondence of reached project outputs with planned outputs and target goals

Project audits can be done during a project is in progress or at its completion. When conducted while a project is still not completed, an audit gives on-the-ground assessment that provides the project manager, project sponsor, and team of what is going well and what is required to be changed in order for the project to be successfully completed, on-time and within set budget. If an audit is undertaken at the project completion, it becomes more of a post-mortem examination performed to define success for upcoming projects and ensure those achieved. The process is basically the same regardless of timing's of an audit.