Project Audit Guidelines

TechLauncher projects are reviewed by tutors, team shadows and the team itself using our Many Eyes Process.

This page provides some guidelines you might consider when conducting your audit.

Conducting the Audit

Your task as a reviewer is to explore the work completed by the team and to use what you find (or don’t find) to complete the Project Audit Tag Report.

We expect that conducting an Audit and submitting the Tag Report would take approximately 1 hour, outside of the tutorial. A good process is to:

• Familiarise yourself with the Audit marking criteria, and the Tag Report form
• Review the work completed by the team and form an overall view as to its quality

More specific tips:

Look at the actual work done

It is important that you look for evidence of the actual work completed by the team. If you cannot find the actual work done, then contact the team so that they can improve their work.

Look through the repositories

Every team is expected to have put in place mechanisms to store and track the artefacts they produce during their project. The repositories should be well organised and incorporate version control - especially for software projects. If there is no repository, then document tags such as No evidence, Work is inaccessible. Check that version control is being used. A complete version history is a good way to understand the processes and progress of work undertaken by the team. If, for example, a team has just uploaded a bunch of work in recent days, then select tags such as Ad-hoc processes.

Look for evidence

If the team claims to have completed specific work, then you must check that they have actually done that work and that it is of real value. The Audit landing Page should refer you to this evidence (could be documentation, meeting minutes, prototypes, code etc.). For example, the inclusion of a project plan needs to be backed up with evidence that they are actually using the plan. If they are not using the plan, then it is of very little value – i.e. your would tag plan is not being followed.

Look for decision-making

Teams are expected to make, implement and track decisions during their project. You should look for evidence of this during your review (documentation, meeting records etc.). It is very important that decisions are supported with principled evidence. Decision making should be according to a robust process that is likely to lead to project success. For example, there should be evidence demonstrating the feasibility of any requirements specification or detailed project plan produced by a team. This may take the form of stakeholder consultation, experimentation, prototyping, evaluations, research, etc.

Work quality

You can use the notes sections of the tag reports to comment on the quality of the team’s work, but be constructive and offer suggestions for improvement where applicable.