Relevance Diagnosis. How to improve the benefit of a project

Observation of recent construction projects reveals two recurring features:

• significant cost overruns compared with initial budget authorizations;

• significant slippage in schedules, with consequent difficulties in making works available.

Careful analysis of these failures points to the same cause: the lack of robust specifications. Under this term, we mean the provision of specifications that are sufficiently well thought-out to be intangible and non-negotiable.

This tendency to work in a relaxed manner also reflects two trends in project management methodology:

• the management of collective work between different occasional stakeholders (the project-enterprise) remains little theorized and leaves too much to individual initiative;

• existing industry standards ( ISO 9 001 , ISO 14 001 , ISO 26 000 , ISO 18 000 ...) have often drifted towards a pure formalism that is indifferent to the very consistency of the projects. The way things are done takes precedence over the object produced.

However, going back to basics, i.e. re-reading the founders of these approaches, leads us to believe that the very reason for these methods is not simply to implement more formatted processes, but to respond to an expectation.

Juran defines quality as fitness for use.

Under these conditions, to ensure that projects run smoothly, it seems essential to ask two important questions before launching any project:

• What is the primary purpose of the action to be undertaken? Why was it initiated? Why is it being considered? Is the objective being pursued well-defined, and not merely justified by a reification of a problem without any reflection on its causes?

• beyond the problem, is the principle of the proposed solution likely to produce a tangible result? Is there a fit between the means envisaged and the expectations expressed? Can we be reasonably sure of successfully completing the project and actually achieving the objectives set?

All these well thought-out questions, when organized and structured, define a new stage in any project, that of relevance diagnosis. In what way does it truly meet the initial expectations, and does it...