How Our Past Practices Shape Future Success
Strategy #2
Learning from Experience: Reviewing past projects to identify common bottlenecks is a proactive approach to prevent recurring issues.
How do you do this if there isn’t a great repository of “lessons learned” from your past projects? Let’s face it, but by the time projects end, you are exhausted. Although we know that it will benefit us and the organization to gather information about what worked and what didn’t work in hindsight, there’s little energy left to do this work effectively.
Therefore, take what is available, certainly, but consider this a starting point to the process of learning from your experience. Whatever is already documented, use it to create a first take on what will be pertinent to your project. Please note: assigning blame or fault is not helpful or necessary. It’s rarely the intention of anyone involved in a project to cause an issue or delay. Get behind what happened, dig deeper to find the process mistake, rather than defaulting to assuming that someone just did a bad job. .
What works more positively and actionably is to create categories of what you need to know from the past. People, Process, and Technology are good ones to start with. Then see how many of the following questions you can answer with the information on hand:
What was the original project deadline?
What was the original project budget (broken down by categories: software, training, etc)
Who was involved in setting up the project (not so much names, but roles and responsibilities)
What risks and issues were encountered that have enough information to understand the scope and scale of them in relation to the project deadline?
Which teams and roles were impacted and how well did they adapt/adopt new processes?
Then, take advantage of the front end energy of project planning to research the information you need from past projects.
Building on the lessons learned available to fill in the blanks or get more detailed explanations of why things did or didn’t work with the project process.
You can do this by
Hosting several “listening sessions” for key stakeholders: facilitated meetings of key stakeholders to learn from their recollections of the project.
Sending short surveys to key stakeholders and capturing their feedback on what worked well and what did not work well in term of the project process
Asking managers to solicit information from their teams about the current state of the project process that was implemented.
How do you use all this data to inform you about the current project being planned? It will highlight where we have had successful strategies as well as missteps in launching projects. This is all gold! Both the positive and negative lessons learned will help create the opportunity to incorporate them into the current project planning process.
