The process of auditing projects by the review of its critical success factors

Abstract

In spite of the fact that benefits from successful project implementation can be achieved by governance over the formal controls and project practices, there is still evidence of high project failure rates across a broad range of industries. It is all too often found that significant effort and emphasis is placed on reviewing the project from the project managers' perspective (with the emphasis on financial and technical aspects), and that independent parties do not perform formal controls. It is understood that an independent project audit would result in an objective report and that all parties involved may not necessarily share the same view. A proposed approach is to have project audits carried out by reviewing the implementation of critical success factors against accepted project standards. These results are tabulated in a matrix that allows for the documentation of success factor implementation and opens up the possibility for scoring the extent of the implementation. This article adds to recent research done in an effort to identify critical success factors and identify new methods for determining them, while focusing on the concept of project audit.