The following are the major activities and tasks within a project diagnosis.

Initiate

1. Prepare your terms of reference.
2. Prepare your outline schedule.
3. Brief your team.
4. Set up the diagnosis administration. This includes setting up files and work books, including registers of documents reviewed during the diagnosis.
5. Select tests, depending on relevance and practicality.
6. Select methods of communication. In some organizations it may be sufficient to send out messages by email. Some senior managers may prefer individual meetings.
7. Inform information resources of the demands that will be made of them. It should be stressed that the project diagnosis team should not have to wait for documents.
8. Gather any available information in advance.
9. Review the diagnosis activities and tasks. Ensure that all the activities are relevant and that sufficient emphasis is given to each task. This may vary from project to project.
10. Highlight any activities or tasks that will require particular attention.
11. Prepare the interview schedule.
12. Agree and sign off the terms of reference.

Establish Basis for Diagnosis

1. Identify the project objectives. This is likely to be from the project charter, although subsequent documents may have amended the project objectives.
2. Identify any contracts. This will especially focus on contracts with external vendors and service providers, although there may be internal contracts (e.g. for systems development).
3. Identify the project plan. The original project plan should be obtained (usually from the project charter), as well as the current project plan.
4. Identify the management, user and contractor expectations. This will go beyond the formal expectations, expressed in the project charter, to include any undocumented expectations.
5. Develop the diagnosis baseline, against which performance will be measured. The topics covered by this will include: deliverables; performance; progress; and costs.
6. Develop a detailed schedule.

Conduct the Diagnosis

1. Conduct interviews.
2. Analyse the project background.
3. Analyse the project objectives.
4. Analyse the customer's motivations.
5. Analyse any contractor's objectives and motivations.
6. Analyse the project organization, management, methods and controls.
7. Analyse the work breakdown structure.
8. Analyse the deliverables.
9. Analyse the milestones.
10. Analyse constraints.
11. Analyse external dependencies and assumptions.
12. Analyse the costs.
13. Analyse the progress.
14. Analyse the performance.
15. Develop a preliminary statement of current project status. This step may establish where further analysis will be required and whether an extension of the diagnosis will be required to analyse particular aspects of the project.
16. Assess the technical quality of the project deliverables. This task may have a stronger or weaker emphasis, depending upon the nature of the project. This should be established by the terms of reference for the diagnosis. At this point, this will be a high level analysis, identifying major technical problems.
17. Develop a preliminary statement of the future project status.
18. Complete the analysis of the project organization, management, methods and controls.
19. Complete the technical quality analysis of the project.
20. Complete the statement of current project status.

Complete the Diagnosis Report

This will be in accordance with the terms of reference.