A08 – Have Program Initiation peer-reviewed

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What

At this point, initiation is almost done, and it’s time to ask another program manager in your organization to help you by peer-reviewing your management activities.

Why

Sometimes, you make simple mistakes that might shock you when you find them, but you don’t find them because you’re too close to the work and they are too familiar to you. Having a new person review what you’ve done helps reduce this problem.

Besides that, you may also make some mistakes because you don’t have the knowledge or experience to understand the mistake, and in those cases, the peer reviewer may catch those mistakes and also teach you why. No matter how experienced and knowledgeable the peer reviewer is, when they see your work, they may learn new things from you as well.

Those two reasons are why it’s a great idea to have peer reviews.

Who

The program manager is responsible for making the arrangements for the peer review.

How

You’ll ask another program manager in your organization to sit with you and go over the Scenarios and other documents prepared to initiate the program. You’ll have a conversation and discuss different aspects of it. The overall result of the review goes to the Health Register, and if you want to make any changes based on the discussions, you can create follow-up items for them and add them to the Follow-Up Register.

If there’s no other program manager in your organization, try to find someone else with similar knowledge to be your peer reviewer, or if there’s no confidentiality problem, use an external person as the peer reviewer. Getting help from people internal to the program or from the projects under it is not a good idea because it may create a conflict of interest for them.

If possible, each time you should use a new peer reviewer to maximize the two advantages of peer reviews as described above.