Interim Reviews
Regardless of your profession, you are likely to find yourself subject to an interim review at some point.
What does it mean?
Interim
Used as an adjective, interim means ‘provisional’ or ‘in the intervening period’, or in a more business specific manner, ‘before the end’.
Review
Re means to do something again. View is to look at something. So a review is to look at something again – that would be the project. You can only obviously look back at what has already happened.
Taken together, that makes an interim review an activity that occurs before the end of something, where you are looking back at what has happened.
Project management
In a project management sense, an interim review is therefore a chance to have a look at how you are getting on, part way through the process. You would use this to:
- Identify what has been completed, and compare it against what was planned for the elapsed period.
- Identify tasks which have not gone as well as they could have. This could be the result of many things: inefficient work, poor planning, items outside of your control (for example, a delivery of equipment was late or faulty), assumptions made during the planning stage which have turned out to be incorrect, or scope creep, just to name a few possibilities
The purpose of this is not to apportion blame. It is impossible to improve something, or fix issues, if you are unaware of them. Similarly, working cautiously, because you aren’t sure what you are doing is correct, is inefficient.
The purpose of a well-organised and completed interim review should:
- Allow modifications to the project plan where required, through identification of problem areas
- Allow workers to continue with greater confidence and therefore efficiency
Useful links
Read the following articles which provide some perspectives on interim reviews.