From Strategy to Jira: Ensuring teams deliver on business goals.
April 23, 2025 | Live Webinar
Categories: Career Development, collaboration tools, communication, Lessons Learned, Project Success, Teams
I’ve been looking at continuous improvement in project management this month, covering why it matters and ideas for building a culture where continuous improvement is the norm. Now I’m going to turn to look at what you have available to help, in terms of tools and techniques.
Luckily for us in project management, we have a range of tools available already that you are using across the rest of your project delivery work, and we can put those to use.
Tools for collecting feedback
First off, you have to make sure that you can collect the improvement ideas. We talked a bit about that in my last article (suggestion boxes) and there’s a lot more you can do – with techniques you will already be familiar with.
Surveys and questionnaires
We use Microsoft Forms for sending out lessons learned surveys and you could set up a form (on any platform) to gather feedback at various points in the project or simply have one on your team intranet page for people to suggest improvements when they think of them.
The trouble with ‘fill it in when you want’ forms is that you have to keep constantly reminding people it is there, so when they do have an idea they go to the form instinctively.
Retros
You’re probably (hopefully) already using retrospectives and lessons learned. Add in questions, if you don’t already have them, for the group to reflect on how project management processes could be changed to deliver better results.
Team meetings
Add an agenda point to your regular team meetings where you talk about what’s been improved, what improvements are being worked on and ask for suggestions. It doesn’t have to be every week, but once a quarter or something like that would work well as a reminder for the team.
Techniques for learning
Once you’ve got some ideas, you’ll want to dig into them and see if they stand up to scrutiny – and whether they are worth the effort to change. Luckily, again as project professionals, we have a range of techniques already in our toolboxes that help us do exactly that.
Root cause analysis
Use root cause analysis techniques (like the ‘5 Whys’) to identify the underlying causes of issues. Then you can focus in on what is genuinely going to address the problem.
Lessons learned databases
You’ve got a repository of lessons learned from each project, right? Take a look through that at the types of projects that have struggled in this area and what has already been done to resolve the problem. That should help prevent you from wasting time on solutions that have already been shown not to work.
Peer reviews and feedback
You’ve got experienced people on the team. They’ve come from different corporate backgrounds and industries, so make use of their knowledge and find out what has worked in their previous roles.
Project management tools
Don’t forget that we also have access to project management tools. Collaboration tools can help people communicate and work together to sort out issues. Planning and scheduling can be done for your improvements, using the tools you already have. Use your knowledge management systems to capture, store and share the ideas, improvements and lessons, so that everyone can benefit from any information created.
With all the resources available to us, it should be easy to make improvements to ways of working. So let’s say you’ve made the improvements, and you want to track how things are going and whether your improvements are having the impact you expected. That’s what I’ll be talking about next time.
Posted on: April 15, 2025 08:00 AM |
Permalink