The Money Files

I taught a webinar on lessons learned recently and while I was researching it I found loads of good tips. I drew from my own experience, that of other people and published research, and I thought it might be worth sharing a few of the tips here.

Be considerate of hierarchical power in the room and split the sessions by delegates if necessary. In my experience, more junior colleagues don’t share the things that didn’t work so well, or point out successes that they were a part of if there are senior managers in the room.

This is going to depend on your organisational culture – maybe everyone is happy sharing. But I remember a workshop (not a lessons learned) where someone who did the job we were talking about shared a point about the detail and the project sponsor (who hadn’t done the job for many years, if he ever had done it at all) said, “No, it doesn’t work like that.” And consequently shut the conversation down. It’s hard to challenge leadership so split the sessions if you need to, if you think it will help you get more honest feedback.

Write up the output and share it promptly. Lessons are already ‘old’ by the time you are talking about them because they’ve happened and you’re reflecting on them. Write up what you need to write up and circulate the actions as soon as you can.

If there are too many actions, prioritize them and focus on the ones that will add most value. Lessons learned meetings can come up with loads of actions, and if you are doing the exercise mid-project, it’s likely you’ll have actual project work to focus on instead of setting up a whole new project just to fix the things you’ve identified.

Delegate actions to other people, or if you can’t do that, just pick a couple of the major points to work on during the next few months. Come back to the rest of the list later.

Avoid scheduling near holiday times. If you need key people to be in the room, make sure they are around. That might mean scheduling the lessons learned conversations now, even if you are mid-way through the project, or a few months in advance so they hold the time in their calendars.

Ask each individual/team to come with their top 3 lessons. Save time in the session itself by getting people to put in some up-front work. Invite them to come along with their top 3 lessons already prepared, either by sending out a survey or question prompts or letting them have free rein.

Be assured that some people won’t have done this pre-work by the time they arrive in your meeting, so you might want to allocate the first 5 minutes of the meeting to silent individual brainstorming. Then everyone can use the meeting time to come up with the things they feel are the most important.

Collate outcomes in groups/categories to better manage them. The suggestions and lessons are going to fall into various categories, especially if you have given the attendees prompts to think about.

If you’re meeting in person, have separate flip charts or when you are picking up sticky notes from attendees, group them together in common themes as you stick them up. It’s so much easier with an electronic whiteboard, where you can ask participants to drag and drop the stickies, or you can do it as they appear on the screen.

Hope these tips help! When’s your next lessons learned session? Let me know that you’ve got one booked in the comments!

There’s a resource risk that should be on your project risk register, regardless of the type of project you are doing. That’s your bus factor. In other words, what risks are you running if a key resource is hit by a bus.

Yes, it’s a bit morbid (use “won the lottery and quit without notice” if you want a discussion point with less dying) but it’s a crucial issue for projects.

The resource doesn’t literally have to be hit by a bus (and let’s hope that they are not). What we’re talking about it is the impact of them not being on the team for a length of time, often with hardly any notice. For example, going off sick, deciding to take another job and HR putting them on gardening leave, needing time to care for a relative or some other absence.

The trouble with project teams is that we don’t normally have a lot of spare resources lying around. People are subject matter experts and you get one of those skilled experts allocated to your team based on need. It’s unlikely that you have a pool of multiskilled people who can step in if someone else is off work for a length of time…sometimes that might be the case, but even if the skills are available, the person who has them might be fully allocated to another project or even – gasp! – doing their day job.

Building resilience into the team is important, but in my experience it’s not often as easy as it sounds. Yes, we cross-skill team members where it makes sense. Yes, I cover for other project managers when they are on holiday for a week. But some tasks need The Person With The Skills and you have to wait for them to come back.

So, now we understand the risk that the bus factor brings to projects, what can you do about it?

First, highlight it in the risk register if you haven’t already. This improves visibility and lets senior managers know it’s a risk you’re carrying.

Next, talk to the team. They can’t predict this kind of ‘bus’ absence but you can get caught out by other types of absence. I once worked on a project where the key functional owner told me that she was on holiday for a fortnight during the project call before she went away. She had tasks scheduled for her to be doing while she was off. Her line manager hadn’t let me know, and to be fair to her, I hadn’t asked her either.

From then on, we regularly asked project team members when their upcoming holidays were, because you can’t always rely on them or their managers to let you know. Especially if the holiday is booked after the project schedule has been put together.

Talking to the team serves another purpose: it can help you identify what you can proactively do to offset the bus risk. For example, workshadowing, setting up a delegate with an account so two people have access to crucial systems, sending two people on training courses instead of one and so on.

Sketchplanations highlights the challenge in the image below. It’s up to you to make sure you’ve put enough measures in place to make sure your project isn’t delayed by unforeseen lack of resource.

Quarter 3 of a calendar year is July, August and September. Your business year might not follow the same quarters, but wherever you are in your business year, it’s probably the right time to be looking ahead at what needs to come next. Here are 3 focus areas for Quarter 3.

Forward planning

Begin strategising and planning for high-priority projects in the upcoming quarters. That might look like warming up stakeholders, seeing who is going to be available to work on upcoming projects, doing some light discovery work or pre-initiation investigation, especially on the areas that are likely to take the most time such as procurement and contract negotiations, or getting suppliers to submit security information and forms, or the RFP process. (Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything!)

Involving the team in these discussions can help maintain their focus on future goals and the bigger picture, while hopefully getting you a head start when you come to get those projects going in earnest.

Process optimisation

There’s never a right time to optimise processes, in my experience. The process is in use and it works, so often it feels better to sort out something that is broken, or that is strategically important. But those inefficient processes contribute to low staff morale and wasting time, month after month, so it’s worth scheduling some time to put some effort in. Each quarter, tackle one point or a couple of points, and soon you’ll build up a momentum and improvements.

So how do we do this? Analyse the project management processes and methodologies. Look for inefficiencies or bottlenecks in workflows that could be streamlined for better performance in busier times. I would look through the lessons learned from recent projects and see what’s highlighted there that could be improved.

Ideally, you’d do a full analysis of all possible problems and highlight one or two from the priority list, but in reality that’s a load of work before you see any improvements. A better option might be to just trust your team. If they are telling you that the change control process is a pain in the behind, just focus in on that for now. Improve what is causing people the most headaches, and trust me, they’ll have an opinion on what that is if you ask them.

Tool use

Do a quick review of who is still using the project management software tools you have. People move on so it might be time to claw back licences from users who are no longer in the business or who have changed roles. And other people might benefit from having the licences.

On the topic of forward planning for the quarter, look at what projects are coming up and whether your current licence package is adequate. You might need to add in more licences if you’ve got more projects or more stakeholders needing access to the tools.

If you foresee a need to add in more users, it might be worth scheduling the training for them now so they can hit the ground running when they get their own account.

What else would you be doing at this time to feel prepared for the upcoming months ahead? Let me know in the comments!

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re seeing the beginnings of a long-awaited summer. I seem to have been affected by the change in season this year more than ever before and I can’t tell you how glad I am to have longer, lighter evenings.

Image credit: ChatGPT

However, the summer days come with a different kind of challenge for project teams. I’d rather be in the garden redoing the rockery than behind my desk in a stuffy office, and I’m sure I’m not alone. How do we keep project teams engaged and productive during the summer months, when vacations and a general slowdown in business activity can impact momentum? And when our momentum might be waning as well?

Here are some tips to share with your team.

Flexible scheduling

Now is the time to be as flexible as possible with work arrangements, especially if your team is in a location where it’s only likely to get hotter (and they don’t have air conditioning). Maybe team members could start earlier or work later into the cooler evenings, taking a Spanish siesta-style approach to the working day.

Remote working is your friend – no one wants to be stuck in a tube or on the metro on a sweltering day.

Fill the slump

Many clients – and even internal customers – might be slowing down work requirements because their core team members are taking a summer vacation. If you’re finding the team with less to do at this time of year, use the slower period for training, team-building activities, or focusing on long-term strategic projects that require deeper thinking and planning.

Perhaps now is the time to get your PMP® certification or take the next professional development step in your career. Or simply organise a step-a-thon: we did one at work recently and the competitive factor was a great motivator for getting out at lunchtime (although most of my steps were done on the spot marching! Still, it all counts!). It was also a team challenge that we could all do independently and remotely.

Get mentoring

Have you thought about mentoring? Set up some mentorship pairings within the team or organisation. Summer slowdowns can provide the perfect timing for these relationships to develop without the pressure of project deadlines.

Carry out mid-year reviews

There’s still work to do, even if it seems like everyone else is out of the office! Schedule your mid-year reviews for the team, or if you don’t have direct reports, make the time to write recommendations and feedback for the colleagues you have worked with and send them to the relevant managers.

Health checks and audits

Not got a team to check in with? Why not check in on your projects instead?

Use any time you have to review the progress and health of ongoing projects. Identify any areas for improvement, risks you might have missed first time round, or changes needed. This could involve revisiting the project scope, timelines, and resource allocations. And most importantly, keeping your records up to date. Forgot to log that change? Do it now before someone asks you about it!

It might feel luxurious to have a slower period – and I know you might be reading this thinking, “What is this slowdown she is talking about?” I have felt that each year gets faster and faster, but I remember back to working in France when Paris emptied during August and I still feel certain industries and locations have seasonal ups and downs.

If summer isn’t your slower period, why not put these ideas to one side for year end or whenever your team has its slower point. They will still be worth doing then too.

Earlier this month I looked at spring cleaning your portfolio to check for strategic fit and also to ensure resources were being managed appropriately.

Now it’s time for step 3 of my decluttering plan: setting clear priorities. You can’t keep everything tidy if you don’t have a plan for how to manage the space going forward. Otherwise, the clutter starts to build up again (looking at you, cupboard under the stairs).

It’s really important to set clear priorities for the remaining projects in the portfolio (the ones you haven’t swept away with the clean sweep brush) and develop a roadmap for execution that aligns with organisational goals.

You probably already have a strategic, portfolio roadmap, and if you haven’t reviewed that yet, it’s worth it, so you’re starting this section of the year with a fresh slate and clarity about where everyone is going.

Focus on high-impact initiatives

Scan through the portfolio and make sure projects are prioritised appropriately. Use scoring models and an alignment matrix, or whatever prioritisation model you have agreed with your stakeholders, to ensure everyone is focused on the high-impact initiatives. Typically, these are the ones which are relatively straightforward to deliver and have high benefits. You might use a PICK chart (let me know if you want me to write about PICK in a future article, it’s quite a useful tool to Google if you don’t already use it) or something similar to pull out the projects where it’s worth investing your time and resources.

Remember, even if you did this exercise a while ago, things might have changed. The business context is different now to how it was even 3 months ago, so it’s worth keeping prioritisation under review.

Create (or refresh) your roadmap

If you already have a roadmap, pull it up and check that the key milestones and timelines are still valid. Adjust as necessary, being as flexible as you need to be and flag anything that needs approval before it is updated. For example, you may have internal rules about the number of projects that can go live at any one time in an area and now the portfolio plan shows that guidance would be broken with the current timescales. Discuss internally and update so that you’re not overloading any single area with too much change at once.

Engage stakeholders

Finally – although this is something you’ll be doing throughout the spring cleaning process – check in with key stakeholders. They should be aligned and supportive of project prioritisation, both the process for assessing priorities and the final outcome of the prioritised list.

Hopefully, getting buy in is straightforward, because you’ve aligned priorities to the strategic plan and everyone can see that this roadmap is the best approach to making sure all the projects get the organisation closer to delivering on the overall objectives.

When all that is done, you can put down your dustpan and brush. The old stuff has been swept away and the portfolio is looking clean and refreshed. After your spring cleaning I think you deserve a well-earned rest!