Project Readiness Assessments - A Must-Have On Your Readiness Checklist

How many people do you need to change a light bulb? 

Unfortunately, the answer is not a number. Project managers across the world need to answer this simple yet complicated question while preparing for upcoming projects and determining project readiness of their teams.

Just like it takes a village to raise a child, it takes Strategic Workforce Planning teams, Resource Management Groups, Delivery teams, Talent Acquisition & Talent Development teams to ensure the right talent with the right domain, technical and soft skills gets deployed on the right projects. It is a project manager’s responsibility to ensure their teams have functional, operational and people skills required to deploy and deliver projects successfully. 

The first element to check on a project assessment checklist is to know whether a team is ready to work on a project. Are the team’s skills in line with upcoming projects? Can the team perform as per a client’s requirements? Before we answer how to assess a team’s project readiness, we must answer a few important questions. 

• What is project readiness? 
• Is there a way to gauge the project readiness of your employees? 
• How can a project manager conduct a project readiness assessment? 

Let’s start with the fundamentals. 

What is project readiness? 

Essentially, project readiness is a state of preparedness involving all stakeholders, internal and external, and their ability to successfully take on, develop and deliver a project. A significant contributing factor to project readiness is the degree of technical skills and management skills possessed by each member of the project team. While management skills form the fundamentals of any project, technical skills tend to take a core place of importance in project deployment. This is why it is crucial to determine the level of project readiness before taking up a project. 

The degree of project readiness contributes to various factors in the delivery outcome of a project. From resource planning to managing timelines, manpower and even budgeting, a project readiness matrix will offer project managers the right insights and help them streamline project delivery to the letter. Let’s understand each of these impact points briefly. 

Planning 

It is important to determine whether the current team has the necessary skills to make a significant contribution to a project. Be the management, operational or technical skills - without the required hands-on knowledge and ability to apply said knowledge, a team won’t be able to score very well on a project readiness assessment index. It is also important to note that resource planning managers are unlikely to have a clear idea of the abilities of each resource - especially when the project requires a large pool of talent to ensure delivery. Here’s where the expertise of learning and development managers comes handy. We deep dive into the role of learning and development managers in project readiness assessments later in this article. 

Timeliness 

Being well versed with the technical, operational and managerial capabilities of a team can help the project manager map out the timelines along with any buffer time to resolve any disruptions. A well chalked out timeline will allow project managers to assign the right resources and optimise their skills to deliver the project with increased efficiency. 

Budgeting 

Knowing the capabilities of the current team will allow project and resource planning managers to work in collaboration with talent acquisition and talent development teams. Together, these teams can determine whether the project will require new resources or whether internal training programs can enhance and hone the current skills of the team members and make them project ready for any upcoming projects. Once the talent acquisition and/or talent development requirements are known, project and resource planning managers can develop budgeting frameworks easily. 

Determining project readiness is a crucial part of technology projects. Let’s briefly understand why organizations need high competency in technology projects. 

• For starters, having competent tech staff can reduce the number of disruptions occuring due to errors.
• Additionally, having team members with hands-on experience simplifies maintaining framework based application development.

For any organization with an average annual revenue of $5 billion, not being project ready can lead to year on year losses in opportunity cost of a whopping $99 million. 

While monetary losses are just one significant repercussion of not being project ready, it is important to understand other negative impacts of not being project ready. 

Delayed delivery

When a competent team is not in place, it delays the delivery of the project, causing a domino effect and disrupting all other dependent changes in the pipeline. An incompetent team doesn’t just impact their own project, they could result in delays across operations. 

Losses 

Delays and disruptions will add expenses not just for the client but also for the project team. There are likely to be additional expenses of replacing mis-hires. The consulting team could also risk losing the business account altogether. Additionally, businesses could miss out on market opportunities leading to opportunity loss. 

Damaged credibility 

With a team that is unable to deliver within the stipulated timeline, organizations are likely to experience considerable damage to their reputation and are likely to lose out on business in the future. 

Keep up with rapid change in technology 

In a world where new technology springs up and old technology becomes obsolete almost simultaneously, it is important for a team to be adept with the increasing demand for technology based skills. IT consultants, IT services personnel and IT audit teams need to be up to date with their technical certifications in order to be project ready. Failing these certifications or not being updated can disqualify a candidate’s eligibility for working on a project. 

How can businesses ensure project readiness?

Project readiness can be determined based on the team’s capabilities and skills. Each team player could bring a different value add to the project and that is why it is important to assess a wide variety of skills to determine project readiness. Let’s understand the fundamental parameters of a project readiness checklist. 

Talent experience 

Work experience plays a crucial role in determining the degree of project readiness for any team. A team with mid to senior level resources are likely to have worked on similar projects and will have gained hands-on experience - this means they will have the capabilities to address any disruptions, fix any bugs during development and testing and even ensure timely maintenance. An inexperienced team with a higher number of entry level talent will not be familiar with disruption scenarios and might take time to fix bugs. 

Technical knowledge and certifications 

For project deployment, clients prefer to have teams with certifications so that the projects are delivered efficiently. This means technical staff need to stay up to date with any new technology. 

Soft skills

Functional skills are not the only parameter to determine project readiness. Team members need to be able to work in liaison with each other as well as the client to ensure efficient and timely delivery. Soft skills including abilities to work with the team, communicate formally and informally and ensuring attention to detail are important for determining project readiness. 

Hands-on skill application

An important part of a team’s skills are their ability to put their theoretical knowledge into action and even in some cases handle the unexpected, real-world business scenarios. It is important for team members to have the required aptitude to seamlessly deliver a project whilst managing any disruptions, bugs and development issues. 

It might be easier said than done due to an array of challenges to determine project readiness of employees.

1. Way too much focus on knowledge retention and less focus on hands-on skill application
2. Lack of readily available technical environments to evaluate hands-on skills objectively
3. Lack of smart technology to automate evaluation and reduce manual effort
4. Lack of skill benchmarking & skill insights of hands-on technical skills across an organization

Due to the above challenges, project readiness assessments can help pinpoint gaps in skills and capabilities, leading to a two-fold benefit. Project managers can ring onboard candidates they find most suitable for delivering projects. They can also put in a request for acquiring talents with specific skills. 

A crucial outcome of a project readiness assessment is that it will allow learning and development teams to figure out which talent teams need extra attention and which skill gaps need to be addressed right away. As such, learning and development teams will be able to map out and design training programs to hone the existing skills of employees. 

Now that you are aware of the parameters contributing to project readiness and why project readiness is important, it is time to understand how to assess project readiness. Organizations can conduct their own assessments; however the results are likely to be influenced by internal politics, organizational perceptions and assessor bias. Moreover, such assessments will have their own set of limitations. 

Organization led assessments can be time consuming if taken up manually. Moreover, they are likely to be expensive and have a high risk of assessor bias. But the most significant downside to an organization conducting assessments on their own is that the assessments are unlikely to evaluate talent skills at a holistic level. Assessments to determine project readiness should not be limited to evaluating technical skills. Additionally, they shouldn’t evaluate employees at a mass scale. The lack of a skill meter will hurt the abilities of the team as a whole unit and won’t promote any individual opportunities for growth.  

For organizations looking to take up projects at a 100% readiness index, the need of the hour is an assessment system that can evaluate the skills of employees and use those results to bridge talent skill gaps. That’s where iMocha Projects can help. 

iMocha Projects - a holistic solution to gauge project readiness 

iMocha Projects is a holistic assessment evaluation system that can help organizations test the skill capabilities of their employees and identify areas of competence and areas of improvement. It is a robust solution that can help businesses look beyond the realm of algorithms and syntax to evaluate employee’s hands-on capabilities and provide insights into what it takes to build projects independently. With iMocha Projects assessments, assessors can identify the gaps in hands-on skills and deploy the most competent or skilled employees for projects. 

iMocha is not just limited to technical skill assessments. The project assessments have been designed to target various business cases including capstone projects for freshers, critical project deployment for experienced resources, pre-joining program assessments as well as ideathons and hackathons. Each business case offers the assesses a simulated environment with scenarios and question types they are likely to come across in real world operations.

• iMocha Projects assesses all kinds of technical skills necessary for front-end, back-end, full stack, database, data science, DevOps, and Quality Assurance roles. 
• Pre-defined test scenarios and a real-world development environment (IDE) allows assesses to attempt questions they are likely to face while working on actual projects. 
• Completely eliminate manual evaluations with automated scoring and reporting. 
• A scalable cloud-based platform that allows organizations to assess a large number of candidates simultaneously. This works great while evaluating entry-level candidates. 
• Detailed skills intelligence reporting with in-depth skill analytics across a wide range of parameters including skill benchmarking, pre-learning and post-learning training effectiveness. One can conduct an overall project readiness review as well as evaluate each test case within a whole project. 
• Live output preview window to allow developers to easily keep track of their progress and validate the execution of the project. This is an essential requirement as managing errors and improving overall efficiency of a project is a core skill required for assessing project readiness. 
• Flexible assessment environment that can be paused at will to reduce the pressure of the assessment on test takers while also allowing them to showcase their time management skills and ability to meet deadlines. 
• Contextual code completion feature to assist candidates to enable faster coding. 
• Reports allow access to the Source Code thereby allowing the assessor to check the universal validity of the code. This minimizes the need for assessors to wait on a field expert to help with evaluation. 

iMocha’s assessments take a multidimensional approach to skills testing, with questions that not only test technical skills but also other soft skills that are required while delivering projects. 

Final Thought

Identifying a team’s degree of project readiness is just the first step to making a team truly project ready. By adopting a business first approach, organizations can appoint their learning and development teams as project partners. This will help them identify and understand skill gaps and give them insights for designing training programs to further their growth ensuring project readiness every single time. With iMocha Projects, businesses are gathering previously unknown but actionable insights to better conduct project readiness review of their talent teams.