Lessons Learned
Categories:
Teams
Categories: Teams
| Recently I had a team meeting to discuss lessons learned from a project and how we could document them to help reinforce the positive experiences and avoid the negative ones. As expected, we had a template to document the lessons. We had one team in the room and other teams on a conference bridge and two hours to get it done. Of course, that came with pizza and drinks. How do you manage to collect, assess, validate and populate data in a two-hour window? You have to have this data already present and entered into the system of some kind (whether it's electronic or paper), with such parameters as experience rating, failure points, links to deliverables each item refers to, impacts etc. And you have to have this information ready and available for this special meeting that simply reviews the results of what you've gathered over the course of the life of the project. A system of lessons learned would include or require the following: 1. Lessons learned as one of the deliverables of the project 2. Method/forum for submitting lessons learned to the project management office or senior management overlooking the project or running the functional areas that require changes based on lessons learned 3. Method or process for integrating those lessons into the organization 4. Method of entering the information, such as electronic lessons learned system (web- or network-based) or collection of documents, spreadsheets etc. 5. Method of accessing lessons learned information from past projects, relating to specific areas of the project or organization 6. System to have these items as required components of milestones on the project plan 7. Contribution to the lessons learned from issue reviews in a semi-automated way, so that at the end of the issue review or steering committee meeting you could use the data to post it to the lessons learned system Success of a lessons learned system depends on a buy-in from the sponsor, the steering committee and the organization to all the items above. Have you implemented a lessons learned system recently or participated in a lessons learned review? What was your experience? |
Day by Day
| Managing everyday project tasks is not rocket science. But it is a function of good discipline, time management, prioritization and overall organization. (We are in the project management business after all.) There are ways to organize our time and efforts on key project priorities and--as a result--get things done. 1. View each day as another opportunity to get back on track or achieve more. Erase the shortcomings of yesterday and plan realistically for tomorrow. 2. Accept that you can only handle so much in one day. Achieve your ultimate best by estimating how much and the type of work you can handle. 3. Try to only take on assignments or project tasks that you know you can finish and be realistic when estimating your ability to do a given task within the committed period of time. Your goal is to under-promise, but never to under-deliver. 4. Focus on delivering your tasks with highest quality and before the deadline. Approach each project task or activity as if you were to be audited. With these principles in mind, try the following system--and implement it now, not later: 1. Clear Your Inbox • Process all e-mails in your inbox and listen to voicemails today, instead of putting them off for tomorrow.2. Create and Maintain a One-Page To-Do List • Choose a system that will be your central depository of all of your "to-do's". It can be via e-mail, notebook or a stack of sticky notes, whatever works for you.3. Set Your Number One Goal for Tomorrow • This is the one thing you will complete or will considerably contribute to. It's your highest priority. |
Our Biggest Unused Weapon
Categories:
Risk Management
Categories: Risk Management
| The primary capital ship of most blue-water navies is the aircraft carrier. According to Rob Stern, in U.S. Battleships in Action, Part 2 a pair of aircraft carriers can deliver around 35 tons to a target in one hour. A United States Iowa-class battleship can do the same job in 90 seconds. The U.S. Navy has four of these battleships, but, fortunately for enemies of the United States, only one is in the reserve fleet, while the others have been converted to museums. Why is such a clearly effective weapon not in use? It may be because of the relative ease with which aircraft carriers sank battleships during World War II, leading to the conclusion that the carriers were superior naval vessels in all respects. In the epic struggle to advance project management capability within our organizations, I think it's important to recognize that we are in competition with other management approaches and information streams. And in this competition, we may be failing to use the most powerful weapon in our arsenal: the capability of an Earned Value Management System (EVMS) to predict the future. Accurate prediction of the future is obviously a very useful capability. In the project management world, the key pieces of future information include: How much will this project end up costing, and how long will it take? These twin brass rings of project management information are hotly pursued in a variety of ways--most of them incorrectly, in my opinion. The most common approach is to re-estimate the remaining costs and duration of an on-going project, and to then add that amount to cumulative costs or duration. This method, despite being notoriously inaccurate and injecting hundreds (if not thousands) of purely subjective data elements into the mix, is often defended as the only appropriate approach. Conversely, the best approach--calculating the estimate at completion (EAC)--is commonly derided by so-called project managers, even though it's faster, easier and demonstrably more accurate than its re-baselining counterparts. The most familiar EAC formula, the Budget at Completion (BAC) divided by the Cost Performance Index (CPI), can be algebraically reduced to dividing the cumulative actual costs by the project's percent complete. This formula works with durations as well: Divide the cumulative duration by the percent complete, and you have an accurate idea of how long a given task will take. With such an easy, simple and powerful weapon in our arsenal, why aren't we using it more? |
Gaining Acceptance
| Every project has an acceptance criteria defined for deliverables but I wonder how many of us get the explicit acceptance from our stakeholders. In a long-running project we keep delivering to the client but rarely bother to get a formal approval on the delivery--which may create problems at the end of the project. I've experienced problems in a couple of projects because of no formal acceptance of the delivery. Ideally, for each delivery you should ask for explicit acceptance from the authorized stakeholder and communicate that authorization through weekly status reports. This will help you in the final acceptance of the project and initiating the maintenance phase, which would be a billable effort. Then the project team should follow up with the client to get a sign-off on specification, design, code, etc. Am I alone with this problem or is it something others have faced as well? |
General Motor's PMO
Categories:
PMO
Categories: PMO
| As director of the enterprise program management office at General Motors (GM), Paul Checkowsky oversees program management offices around the world in different functionary areas like sales, manufacturing and supply chain. He took some time to answer a couple of questions about the state of the project management office (PMO) at the auto giant and throughout the world. How has the economic downturn affected the PMO at GM? From an economic standpoint, we've got to be a lot more careful about getting the most value for our money. A couple of examples: In the past, we've focused a lot on quality assurance of the process--making sure that people are following all of the steps. That's very time-consuming and can be expensive. Now we've built the quality-assurance process into the steps. We no longer have checkers checking peoples' work. We basically built the quality into the process, so that at the end, we don't need to perform a final quality review. We are also doing more backward planning rather than forward planning. We are making timing and content commitments to our business community at the beginning of the year and we are holding the project teams to those commitments. We then plan backward to determine what and when we have to do to achieve the commitments. Many project teams are not comfortable with this approach but it does force teams to get off to a fast start and forces them to resolve issues in a timely and efficient manner. The other thing we've been doing is instead of being a policing organization, [the PMO] is now much more involved with mentoring upfront-- making sure the project teams are aware of the processes and helping them know where they might encounter bumps in the road. Do you think more organizations are realizing the value of the PMO? They are. Actually, in the last six to 12 months, I've [received] a lot of feedback from individuals saying that this new approach--where the PMOs are actually part of the teams doing the work--is very effective. [Organizations] themselves are finding ways to leverage these PMO capabilities and this expertise especially helping to identify and resolve integration issues, mentoring of enabling processes and eliminating deployment roadblocks. So I think it's been very positive, and I think it's here to stay. Mr. Checkowsky says it's hard to say what is going to happen with GM's EPMO in light of the economic situation. At the time of this interview, news headlines speculated the organization's possible bankruptcy. Overall, however, he says that "people are going to expect more with less. That's not going to change. We're going to have to do a lot more with fewer people, less money and less time." Despite the challenges, however, he says there are exciting opportunities out there. "Because of the conditions that we're facing, this is really an opportunity for us to put some changes in place that we've considered in the past. "Before, there wasn't a burning platform. Now, there is. So people are much more open to changes and new ideas--where in the past, they'd be, "This has worked for us all of these years. Why change?" Now people are realizing they do need to change. It's actually an opportunity to put some of these new approaches in place. We've just got to make sure that they're effective." |
