Decompressing Issues

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Lessons Learned   Risk Management  

Projects move quickly. There are deadlines to meet and tasks to execute. The project team does not always have time to sit down and really examine the problems or issues that have occurred; their focus is on solving it and moving forward.

That is exactly how projects should work, but afterward when there is time, it can be very helpful for everyone to take a hard look at what happened and decompress the issue. This might occur when there is a natural break in the project, or it may need to wait until the project is complete. The project manager should ensure that severe and complicated issues are examined at some point so that everyone can learn from what happened on the project.

Root Cause
The first step when examining an issue that occurred on the project is to determine the root cause. This goes beyond examining the issue and should identify where the breakdown started. If many defects were identified late in the testing phase, then the project team focused on solving the defects as quickly as possible during the project.

When you examine the root cause, though, you need to look at the defects and follow the trail backward through the project plan and identify what originally caused the defects. Were there requirements that were misunderstood? Were there inexperienced software coders? Was there some other reason? Once you have identified the root cause of …

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