What Is Project Analysis & How Can You Do It In 2025?

Even the most meticulously planned projects can steer off course, leaving your team scrambling to meet deadlines, budget goals, or mess up the whole outcome.

The truth is, surprises aren’t the problem—how you handle them is.

Without a proactive approach, even minor hiccups can snowball into major setbacks.

This is where project analysis comes in: your strategic pause button. It’s the process of stepping back, scrutinizing risks, and mapping out solutions before issues derail progress.

Think of it as buying a flashlight when you know you’ll be going to a foggy landscape—it helps you spot obstacles early, adapt plans, and fix errors as they arise.

In this guide, I’ll break down the nuts and bolts of project analysis, going over the different steps in project analysis and how to conduct it.

But first, let’s start with the basics: 👇

What is project analysis?

Project analysis involves an examination of a project's elements to assess its viability, risks, and alignment with your strategic goals.

This multifaceted approach integrates various analytical techniques to evaluate a project's objectives, timelines, costs, resources, and potential risks.

➡️ The reason why we do project analysis at SmartSuite is to not only make better-informed decisions but also avoid costly mistakes and increase the likelihood of project success.

Project analysis is not something that is done after the project or during the project, but before the project, so you can adequately prepare for bottlenecks before they arise.

What are the different types of project analysis?

Here are the main types of project analysis that you should be familiar with:

Risk Analysis: Identifies, assesses, and prioritizes potential risks to develop mitigation strategies and ensure project continuity.

➡️ For example, you could identify a high likelihood of data security breaches in cloud hosting and preemptively partner with a cybersecurity firm to encrypt user data.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: Quantifies costs and benefits to determine financial viability and compare project alternatives.
Project Simulation: Models different scenarios to predict outcomes and assess their impact on project timelines and resources.
Process Analysis: Examines workflows to identify inefficiencies and optimize task execution for improved productivity.

➡️ What we do here in SmartSuite is that we audit customer onboarding workflows to discover bottlenecks in our onboarding process.

Scenario Analysis: Explores hypothetical situations to assess how different conditions (e.g., market shifts) might impact project outcomes.
Feasibility Analysis: Determines whether a project is technically, financially, and operationally viable before committing resources.
Critical Path Method: Identifying the order of tasks and sub-tasks that need to be completed on time to ensure the project stays on schedule.

💡 You can use SmartSuite’s Gantt view, where critical tasks are determined automatically based on the current dependency configuration.

Stakeholder Analysis: Maps key stakeholders’ interests, influence, and expectations to align project goals with their needs.
Sensitivity Analysis: Tests how changes in variables (e.g., costs, timelines) affect project success to prioritize critical factors.

Why is project analysis important for project leaders?

Project analysis is crucial for project leads because it uncovers potential pitfalls early on, before the project has even started, so you can plan for them.

Without it, you risk navigating the project blindfolded, risking budget overruns, missed deadlines, or scope creep.

The project analysis frameworks I mentioned earlier help you align stakeholders and tasks by preventing costly miscommunication and ensuring everyone’s expectations are met.

For example, I’ve seen projects prolong with weeks on end due to overlooked dependencies in the project management workflow, such as employee X not knowing that another task needed to be done by employee Y before they could start.

💡 Another project ‘’killer’’ is unrealistic timelines, which is why in SmartSuite we try to set realistic deadlines (that is confirmed by multiple people) and see our project progress using a timeline view.

How to conduct a project analysis? Risk analysis example

That article would turn into a book if I showed you how to run every different kind of project analysis.

Nonetheless, I wanted to walk you through our risk analysis process since we also have a template for it that you can use.

Here’s how you can conduct a risk analysis for your project in 5 steps: 👇

1. Break down each one of your project's tasks

The first step to creating a project management workflow is to identify all tasks that are required for the project's completion based on the original scope.

Let’s take an example with identifying all of the tasks required for a website migration scope from the SEO team’s perspective:

Conducting an SEO audit to figure out which pages need to be transferred over to the new website and identify the current technical problems to call out.
Conducting URL remapping of the URLs that will be transferred over to the new website.
Conducting a large-scale technical audit to identify the current technical problems so that the same mistakes are not repeated in the new website.
Benchmarking the performance of the current website to evaluate the post-migration changes in keyword rankings.
Supporting the website development team to create the new page templates that will be used on the new website, such as the article, product, and category page templates.
Setting up the rules in Robots.txt for crawling the website and disallowing URL paths that should not be crawled.
Etc.

You want to assign all of these tasks to each team member, with clear deadlines, and also a budget if it’s needed.

2. Map out the dependencies

Now that you’ve got all tasks in one place, you want to start thinking of the dependencies of each one of them.

That means identifying tasks requiring completion before others can begin (e.g., "Task B depends on Task A").

In the case of the SEO migration project from the SEO team’s perspective, dependencies include:

Conducting URL remapping of the URLs that will be transferred over to the new website, AFTER the executive team has confirmed which URLs they want to keep.
Conducting the initial SEO audit of the new website, AFTER the developers have given you access to the new website’s staging environment.
Conducting a final audit of the website, AFTER the developers have built the new pages on the website.

➡️ You can use SmartSuite’s Gantt chart view to you can highlight dependencies to create the project roadmap and enable your stakeholders to visualize it.

Learn more about SmartSuite’s Gantt chart view:

3. Assess the risks associated with each task and the project as a whole

This is where you want to start collecting your thoughts and figuring out what can realistically go wrong with each of these tasks.

You want to be able to highlight potential roadblocks (e.g., technical failures of the new website) and evaluate project-wide risks, such as not being able to find a good web development agency on time.

Project leaders can then collect their thoughts:

Categorize risks: Classify as financial, operational, technical, or external (e.g., market changes).
Score likelihood/severity: Use a risk matrix to prioritize high-impact, high-probability risks.

4. Figure out the potential impact that it could have on the project’s outcome

The next step is to figure out the potential impact that these risks might have on your project’s outcome.

That means quantifying the potential delays or costs.

You want to estimate how the risks you typed out could affect timelines (e.g., "2-week delay if X occurs").

As a project management example, the SEO team not getting access to the staging environment on time might delay the migration by 2 weeks.

Or, even worse, the SEO team not getting the staging environment on time might result in the new website being published without the SEO team having any say in it, resulting in losing organic traffic.

This is why you want to prioritize critical risks by putting your focus on impacts that could seriously derail objectives or exceed contingency budgets.

5. Create a mitigation plan summary

Lastly, a good project leader will create a mitigation plan summary to:

Define preventive actions: Outlining steps to reduce likelihood (e.g., "test software prototypes early").
Prepare contingency plans: Specifying responses if risks materialize (e.g., backup suppliers).

➡️ I’d also recommend you to assign what we call risk owners, who are designated team members who need to monitor and address the risks.

The best project leaders are both preparing for and tracking potential risks and bottlenecks that could impact the project’s success.

You can use SmartSuite’s project risks and issues template to visualize the risks associated with your project: 🔽

Here are the fields that we have in our customizable risk management template:

Likelihood of the risk of occurring, such as the website running into technical difficulties or the SEO team not getting staging environment access on time – from 1–5.
The potential impact that could have on the project’s outcome – from 1–5.
The total risk score, which is calculated by multiplying the likelihood of the risk by its potential impact on the project.
The mitigation plan summary, where you should outline the accurate response to the crisis at hand.

You can also keep a tab of the existing issues that have been identified, such as an issue with the server during the SEO migration project.

You can play around and customize the risk management template here.

What are the common challenges faced by project leaders where project analysis can help?

Here are the 3 project management challenges that I’ve seen being dodged with proper project analysis and evaluation: 👇

Unclear project goals and scope creep

Project analysis helps project leaders clarify objectives and establish benchmarks to detect and prevent scope deviations.

To prevent confusion, you want to ensure a clear overview of responsibilities and priorities for everyone involved.

Ineffective risk management

Proactive analysis identifies potential risks early, prioritizes them by impact, and develops mitigation strategies to minimize disruptions.

➡️ In our SEO website migration example, one of the main risks is losing access to the new website's back end (e.g., after a crash).

This is why a mitigation strategy would be to create a backup of the old website.

Resource over-allocation or under-allocation

There’s nothing worse than finding out that you’re a few thousand dollars short, or, on the other side, too much money is being allocated for tasks that do not require it.

This is why you want to keep track of resource allocation per task and per project, and list out the different inventories, people, or tools which you’ll need and how much it’ll cost.

You can use SmartSuite to track your spending and budgets for each project or task.

Here’s how you can use SmartSuite for operational efficiency:

Next Steps: Try SmartSuite & Our Templates For Free

You might be thinking that your project is too small to be thinking about potential risks and bottlenecks.

However, having a pre-determined plan for what would happen in a certain scenario would not hurt you.

You can spot issues before they arise, and you can better plan for crises.

SmartSuite’s platform offers just the right customization, native collaboration capabilities and a library of 200+ project management templates to help you create and maintain a project management workflow.

Here’s what's in it for your team when you try SmartSuite:

Access to a generous free plan with features including multi-board views (Kanban, Chart, Map, Timeline, Card, and Calendar), 100 automations/month, and 40+ field types, including formula and linked record fields.
No-code automation builder to set up to 500,000 trigger/action workflows.
Built-in productivity tools, including time tracking, status tracking, and checklists.
Team collaboration and planning tools such as whiteboards and SmartSuite docs.
Resource management across projects and teams.
40+ field types, including the option to add your custom fields.

Or, if you’d like to talk to our team of experts, schedule a demo.

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