Breaking the Cycle

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Estimating   Lessons Learned   Risk Management  

Have you ever noticed that when project post-mortems or lessons learned take place at the end of projects, there are a few opportunities for improvement identified that seem to come up every time? Why does that happen? Is it because the organization is failing to address those issues? Or worse, failing to accept that there is a real issue there? Maybe…but in many cases, the problem is that regardless of what the organization does, the problems seem to keep recurring.

The specific issues vary from organization to organization, but there always seem to be a few. In this article, I want to try and identify some causes for them and offer some ideas on how you can make 2013 the year when you finally solve those issues and get them off of the post-mortem report once and for all.

Understanding the issue
Making sweeping generalizations is always dangerous, and problems can have multiple causes. But in my experience, when the same problem seems to crop up repeatedly--especially when it would appear to be something that is fairly simple--the problem is one of complacent execution. Examples of this type of issue might be failure to follow process, inaccurate estimation through the use of untested assumptions, failure to recognize risks and issues early enough because of a lack of monitoring and/or management, etc. The individual problems will vary, but you get the idea…

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