Easily Master Project Review Skills for Better Project Management

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Easily Master Project Review Skills

Project reviews are an essential step for every project manager. They not only help summarize project experiences but also identify shortcomings, improving overall team performance. A review is the process of comprehensively analyzing an event or activity after completion, identifying issues, summarizing lessons learned, and providing a basis for future improvements.

In project management, a project review examines and summarizes the entire project process upon completion. The goal is to pinpoint management issues, extract valuable lessons, and guide future projects. Reviews typically involve project participants and management personnel—such as project managers and team members—who collectively discuss and produce a review report.

1. Organize Project Data and Review Goals and Benchmarks

The first step in a project review is organizing project data, including goals, timelines, progress, costs, and risks. Analyzing this data allows you to understand project issues in depth and evaluate whether the project met its expected objectives.

Example: During the review of a new project, data analysis revealed coordination issues due to geographically dispersed team members and ineffective communication methods. Solutions included virtual meetings and cross-regional document sharing to improve collaboration.

When using ZenTao project management software for an e-commerce platform development project, we retrieved data such as planned vs. actual duration, task completion rates, and cost consumption via ZenTao's statistical reports.

• Goal: Complete core functions and launch in 3 months
• Actual: 3.5 months, 90% task completion, 10% budget overrun

The comparison clarified the need to analyze schedule delays, cost overruns, and incomplete tasks in detail.

2. Identify Problems and Analyze Root Causes

This step requires active questioning to uncover the essence of problems.

Example: In a software project delivered ahead of schedule, client feedback indicated poor quality. Was this due to unreasonable design, weak processes, insufficient testing, or other factors?

Using ZenTao’s defect management module, we found multiple recurring functional vulnerabilities. Defect submission data showed many issues emerging late in the project, with some marked as resolved without proper regression testing. Investigation revealed that compressed testing time and heavy developer workloads in later stages led to loose quality control—this was the root cause.

3. Summarize Highlights and Shortcomings

An objective assessment of strengths and weaknesses builds a knowledge base for future planning.

Example: In the same e-commerce platform project, ZenTao’s requirement management module ensured accurate requirements transmission by breaking down and prioritizing customer needs, reducing misunderstandings.

However, ZenTao’s Gantt chart revealed delays in multiple modules during development. Task dependencies had not been fully considered during scheduling, causing inefficient transitions and affecting overall progress.

4. Summarize Patterns and Create Improvement Plans

The final step is to summarize patterns from the review and formulate improvement plans based on them.

Example: From the e-commerce platform project review, we learned that proper task scheduling and strict defect management are critical to success.

Improvement Plan using ZenTao:

• Use task dependency settings to clarify sequences during scheduling
• Standardize defect handling: defects can only be closed after passing tester-led regression testing
• Set up reminders for defect handling deadlines to ensure timely resolution

Best Practices for Implementing Project Reviews

• Hold a review meeting after project completion to share successes and challenges.
• Extract key findings from the review to create an actionable improvement plan.
• Implement and monitor the improvement plan, documenting outcomes for future reference.

By consistently applying these steps, project managers can refine their project management process and enhance performance in subsequent projects.