Why Every Good Project Health Check Includes Tech Governance

Ankitha Sheeba, Principal, Development, Transpire

In order for any digital product or experience to be a success, project health checks are imperative. Along with making sure that everything is running smoothly, they can also help to identify any unforeseen risks or issues that may lead to project failure, which must be avoided at all costs.

But what are the specific aspects of a project health check? And why should tech governance be a priority?

Project Health Checks Explained

Project health checks are regular checkpoints where the current state of the project is evaluated against various criteria to ensure that it is running smoothly.

There are multiple factors that need to be considered when it comes to ensuring that a project is healthy — budgets, adherence to guidelines, quality control etc.

However, ‘tech governance’ is one area of focus at Transpire that often takes precedence over others. Here’s why…

The Importance of Tech Governance

Tech governance is a way through which the technical team building a product can ensure adherence to established technical standards within the organisation.

For customers of Transpire, this results in the following benefits:

• Validation of technical feasibility and standards.
• Confidence in the project roadmap thanks to subject matter expertise.
• Developing a baseline to enable better decision making.
• Recommendations on tech approach with supporting evidence.
• Deliver more value to the organisation.
• Avoidance of project running over time and budget.

Most projects have a tech lead, who is the person responsible for technology-related decisions. This could be a senior developer or solutions architect depending on the project in question.

Tech governance enables the tech lead to ensure that key decisions are discussed and documented for future reference. It also helps to identify any issues or risks and come up with a plan to resolve them.

While it may seem like overkill to perform these rituals for smaller projects and teams, tech governance provides a huge value add and can even help individuals improve their leadership skills.

How is Tech Governance Performed and Implemented?

There are many ways in which to perform tech governance. Here’s an example of one possible strategy:

The tech lead of a project will work alongside its platform lead for 15–20 mins to discuss tech governance items, which should produce a list of key challenges, decisions and actions.

A lot of the time, this process takes place during Sprint 0, as the tech lead can define items on their tech governance sheet and make any decisions that are needed before the project commences.

The following example is for an iOS project but can be tweaked and made applicable to other platforms.

Tech governance can also be run once every iteration to check on high level decisions. This ensures that the iterations are running smoothly, quality standards are being met and the team is across what is supposed to be delivered. It even helps in identifying and resolving any blockers in that iteration too.

A sample template is shown below. The colors indicate the status of each item, while actions and notes are all captured within the document itself.

• Green — Everything’s going good. No action needed.
• Amber — Identified some issues which could be resolved by the project team itself.
• Red — Identified some blockers, need to escalate.

This is continued for every iteration, with the colours telling a story of the general health of the project.

When you consider that just 15–20 minutes on tech governance can lead to better project health and more successful outcomes, it’s an extremely worthwhile process to perform.

If you have any questions about project health checks and tech governance or would like Transpire to transform your digital product or experience with better processes, don’t hesitate to get in touch.