Condensed Lessons Learned Reporting

 

During the May 1916 Battle of Jutland, elements of Great Britain’s Grand Fleet fought to keep the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet from breaking the naval blockade of Germany. Hundreds of ships were involved, but when the smoke cleared the Germans had failed to significantly change the ratio of capital ships between the two belligerents, and the blockade remained in place. One American journalist summed up the massive naval action thusly: “The convict assaulted his jailer, but he is still in jail.”

Along those lines, I think much of what passes for chapter and verse of lessons learned reports can be boiled down to its essential elements, and documented so. A few examples on the topic of the PM’s technical approach:

• On Earned Value reporting: (a) just because you are spending money on a project does not mean you are accomplishing anything, (b) we can prove it, and (c) if you tell me how much you have spent, and how much progress you have made, I can tell you within ten points how much your project is going to cost when it’s done.
• On Critical Path methodology: (a) if you are “managing” your schedule via an action item or milestone list, you’re doing it wrong, (b) we can prove it, and (c) tell me when you started, and how much progress you’ve made, and I can tell you both when your task will be completed, and how that impacts the other activities in this project.
• On Critical Chain theory: if you get done early, help any other members of the project team who are behind.
• On (modern) Communications Management theory: tell everybody you think of everything that’s going on in your project, and nothing bad will happen to you.
• On (modern) Risk Management Theory: you might want to worry about stuff that could happen to your project.
  • Hey! Risk Management also involves “Opportunity Management!”
  • Says who?
  • SAYS US!!! We’re members of the risk management community, and we’re more than a little tired of you accusing us of engaging in “openly fraudulent management science.”
  • Are you aware that none of the authoritative dictionaries of the English language make any references to “opportunity” (other than in listings of antonyms) in their definitions of “risk”?
  • That doesn’t make any difference, since we’ve arranged to have almost all of the PM organizations include our “upside risk equals opportunity” tripe
  •  in their glossaries of terms.
  • Okay, how about “you might also want to concern yourselves with opportunities that may or may not arise.” Happy now?
  • Yes, you may proceed.

The following elements are extremely common to (truthful) lessons learned reports coming from failed or overrun/delayed projects:

• We should have used Earned Value and Critical Path methodologies far earlier than we did.
• The “bottoms-up” Estimates at Completion (EACs) were always optimistic, and often catastrophically so. Conversely, the calculated EACs were always accurate, and could have notified management of difficulties far earlier than the re-estimated versions.
  • On a related note, that project controls person who told us that, in order for our EAC to be accurate, our cost performance would have to go from a cumulative Cost Performance Index of 0.7 to a To-Complete Performance Index of 1.4, and that that had virtually no possibility of happening, and that our posted EAC was therefore nonsense – well, that person was right.
• The tasks that drove most of the project’s overrun were subject to significant amounts of scope creep, and we should have listened to those PM-types who were harping about better and more detailed descriptions of the original scope.
• An “overly optimistic original estimate” explanation in the Variance Analysis Reports (VARs) of negative cost variances will only work a few times before the customer catches on that it’s really our pitiful performance causing the variance.

As with anything that gets condensed, these lessons learned can be significantly harder to digest than their more verbose equivalents. But if the lessons to be learned are couched in phrases designed to soft-pedal the truth, I have to ask: did anybody really learn anything from the past projects’ failures?