When supporting owner clients, we are often challenged over the need to develop full reports at the end of project development phases (such as scoping, preliminary feasibility and detailed feasibility). Still, we do insist on the production of those reports. Our new White Paper 2024-04 ‘Why is There a Need for Owners to Produce End-of-Development Phase Reports?’ explains why it is important to invest the time in producing those comprehensive reports.

When an owner develops a project, a gate-based process is generally applied with key milestones where the project maturity gets reviewed and go/no-go decisions are taken on the project.

At that occasion it is common practice for the project development team to produce a comprehensive report describing the current maturity. This report generally contains an executive summary, and detailed chapters covering all aspects of the project, technical maturity, understanding of project environment in its wider sense, and preparedness for the next project phase.

However, producing such a report is quite an onerous and time-consuming process and we are often challenged on the need to produce such a deliverable: would it not be sufficient to show the set of available deliverables from the various studies that have been conducted during the last project development phase in a PowerPoint summary presentation?

If the project team skimps on the production of the report, and this is accepted by project governance, we have observed the following major consequences:

• Consistency of all the studies performed is not verified, leading to an unsound basis for future studies,
• Lack of assurance that estimates are all based on the basis of a consistent set of assumptions, and that their uncertainty level is consistent across the board,
• Possible blind spots in the value chain of the project either in execution or in terms of project scope, and in the risk analysis of the project
• Frequent lack of maturity of the project preparedness for the next phase (as this is generally not part of the natural deliverables of the previous phase).

We really recommend owner teams to take the time and effort to step back and produce comprehensive reports of the project maturity status at the end of each project development phase, and in preparation for the decision milestones.

It is time that will be well spent taking a high level, systemic view of the project, ensuring consistency across the board, and possibly questioning some assumptions. In addition to ensuring a better project maturity at the milestone, it will feed the next project phase with the right objectives and activities to make the project more successful. Discover more in our new White Paper 2024-04 ‘Why is There a Need for Owners to Produce End-of-Development Phase Reports?’

If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2024-04_why_development_milestone_reports_v0.pdf