Activity: Project Acceptance Review

Roles and Activities > Manager Role Set > Project Reviewer > Project Acceptance Review

Purpose For the customer to formally review and accept the project deliverables.
Steps Schedule Project Acceptance Review Meeting Distribute Meeting Materials Conduct Project Acceptance Review Meeting Record Decision
Input Artifacts: Product Acceptance Plan Iteration Assessment Software Development Plan	Resulting Artifacts: Review Record
Frequency: Once per project
Role: Project Reviewer

Workflow Details:

Project Management

Close-Out Project

The Project Acceptance Review is a formal review between the project team and a customer representative. At this review, the customer verifies that the product and supporting documentation delivered by the project meets the requirements and objectives as set out in the Software Development Plan.

This review occurs after the product acceptance reviews and tests have been completed, at the end of the penultimate iteration of the project (typically the final iteration would be the project close-out phase).

Schedule Project Acceptance Review Meeting

The Project Acceptance Review meeting is a meeting between a customer representative(s), the project's management team (the project manager, plus the team leads for the various functional areas of the project team), and the Project Review Authority.

Once the attendees of the meeting have been identified, set a date/time for the meeting to take place. It is important that you provide sufficient lead time to allow the participants to review the materials that will be used as the basis for the approval decision.

Distribute Meeting Materials

Prior to the meeting, distribute the review materials to the reviewers. Make sure these materials are sent out sufficiently in advance of the meeting to allow the reviewers adequate time to review them. At a minimum these materials should include:

Iteration Assessment for the iteration, including the product acceptance tests and reviews
Software Development Plan (with enclosed Product Acceptance Plan)

Conduct Project Acceptance Review Meeting

During the meeting, the attendees review the results of the product acceptance reviews and tests that are reported in the Iteration Assessment. Using the product acceptance criteria from the Product Acceptance Plan, the group determines the following:

Physical audit results - has the customer received all the project deliverables?
Functional audit results - did the results of the product acceptance reviews and test demonstrate that the product satisfies its requirements?
Has any required customer training been completed?
If required, has on-site installation been successfully completed?

At the end of the meeting, the reviewers should make their approval decision. If some of the product acceptance criteria have not been satisfied, the customer may decide to accept the product conditionally upon certain corrective actions being taken. In this situation you may choose to initiate a new iteration to deal with the issues arising.

The result of the Project Acceptance Review can be one of the following:

Project Accepted	The customer representative agrees that the project deliverables have satisfied the acceptance criteria, and the customer takes possession of the delivered product an support materials.
Conditional Acceptance	The customer representative agrees to accept the results of the project, subject to the completion of specified corrective actions.
Project Not Accepted	The project fails to achieve the product acceptance criteria, and requires additional work and another project acceptance cycle to be carried out.

If the project is not accepted by the customer, the project team should schedule the corrective actions that have been identified, and re-submit a revised Iteration Assessment for a follow-up review. In the case of a "Conditional Acceptance", this assessment only need confirm that the specified corrective actions have been completed. However, if the project was "not accepted", the full suite of product acceptance reviews and tests should be performed.

Record Decision

At the end of the meeting, a Review Record is completed capturing any important discussions or action items, and recording the result of the Project Acceptance Review. If the result was "not accepted" a follow-up Project Acceptance Review Meeting should be scheduled for a later date.

Rational Unified Process