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Getting Real with Lessons Learned
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| By now, if you have been following my blog posts, you know the importance of lessons learned. In past posts, I have provided many tips on how to conduct them, who should be involved and the types of project management tools to use for evaluation in the sessions. But how do you get true value of lessons learned? To glean results that can really fuel change, focus your lessons learned on the following questions and actions: What did not go so well? Do not finger point. Ensure the discussion is targeted toward the actions, not a person. Try to gather specifics. For example, if a delay caused a slip in the project timeline, discuss the lesson that caused the specific problem, and alternatives that might have avoided the delay. Perhaps there was a miscommunication that caused the delay. In that case, extract the lesson that led to that miscommunication. These are the lessons that you want to document and mark for corrective action. Actions or lessons that are not documented well cannot be translated into controllable elements. What went well? Determine your successes, and then strategize what needs to be done so these actions can be repeated. Adopt processes around these successes that may not already exist in your system for managing projects. If it is a process that has been working well for a long time, integrate it with your new and existing policies and procedures but in a way that it remains intact and unchanged. You should also consider rewards and recognition events for successes. There are many ways to accomplish this, even when budgets are tight. For example, using social media by posting praises and kudos to employees online can go a long way. What are we going to do to improve projects going forward? This is really the main objective of lessons learned. You can get together to understand what went wrong and what was right on your projects, but more importantly, you will want to leave the session with a direction on how to have future successes on a continuous basis. For this to happen, take the time to rank the learnings in some ordinal manner. For example, consider what needs to be addressed immediately and how to make the action possible; determine what can be changed and how to minimize the impacts; and explore how to ensure processes are apparent and possibly even mandatory. No matter what ranking system is used, conclude the meeting with an accountable action plan. What do you see as next steps after getting together, gaining reality and gathering the lessons? Share your thoughts below, and Voices on Project Management will publish the best response as a blog post. |
Integrating Project Communications into Lessons Learned
| Lessons learned sessions typically focus on project deliverables and budget. But I'd recommend adding project communications to the agenda of elements to review. Take a hard look at the communications plan and how well it worked. This process should include evaluating the stakeholders listed, the way the tool was manipulated throughout the project life cycle, or even the categories listed on the communications plan, such as audience, frequency and deliverables. Then discuss other communications documents — status reports, issues lists and risk registers — and how to make them more worthwhile. Consider the frequency with which these documents were published and the need to develop communications tools specific for each of your different audiences. Finally, look at your communications with team members and executives. How you communicate with team members is different from how you communicate with management, so these should be separate areas of discussion. Yet for both groups, keep in mind how time zones, language barriers, leadership style and working relationships may have affected communications. When examining your team communications, here are a few questions to ask:
When looking at your communications with management, keep in mind that this probably required less day-to-day communications than you had with the project team. Management's interest is in the big-picture, milestone items, such as presentations on status, the budget and the go-live date. When looking at your communication with executives, ask yourselves:
One last thing to keep in mind: As with any topic in a lessons learned session, be prepared to discuss unforeseen issues. Some project communications mishaps that I have heard about include not bringing in the data owner, issues reported too late or misalignment of user feedback with a requirement. How do you evaluate your project communications in lessons learned? |
The Basics: Skills for a Successful Lessons Learned Session
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| Project professionals wear many hats. As writers, you prepare the project's charter to initiate the project. As leaders, you manage project teams. And as an accountant of sorts, you control the project budget. With the many skills you must possess to oversee a project, you should also be cognizant of the basic skills you'll need when conducting a lessons learned session: 1. Time management The session should be arranged with a specified meeting start and finish time. Team members will have other projects and tasks to work on, so it is imperative to respect the time they give you during the session. Start on time and keep the meeting moving. Pay attention to the clock to control the lengthiness of the discussions. This way, the meeting ends when it was arranged to end. To keep the meeting on track, you may have to tell team members when to close on a discussion point or ask them to discuss it more in-depth at a later time. If needed, schedule an additional meeting to talk about that point, or add it to the meeting notes and solicit feedback when you circulate the document. 2. Ability to engage As the facilitator, you must be able to persuade everyone to participate — from team leads to database administrators. You should also detach yourself from ranking attendees by their titles. After all, the goal of a lessons learned session is to collect details and feedback on a project's activities and decipher what may or may not be relevant to the next project — no matter the team member's position. 3. Shared vocabulary Many times, project teams use jargon that only they know. For example, the word "call" could refer to a programming term or simply to describe a customer service method. If you have not been a part of the project all along, make a point to familiarize yourself with some of the terms that may have been used on the project or may be mentioned in the discussion. What other basic skills do you use for conducting effective lessons learned sessions? |
How To Evaluate Lessons Learned
Categories:
Lessons Learned
Categories: Lessons Learned
| A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) is useful both for navigating the fundamentals of project management and for evaluating lessons learned. It can help you determine if you focused on the right things in your project and where you could have improved. Consider each knowledge area of the PMBOK® Guide as you review your project. In the planning stage, for example, let's say you used brainstorming to develop your charter. Was the brainstorming effective? If so, what made it effective and if not, why wasn't it? Address these things in your lessons learned session. Or, think about the risk management tools you used in your project. The PMBOK® Guide highlights such tools as 'The Probability and Impact Matrix' or the 'Data Quality Assessment.' If either was used during your project, in the lessons learned session you could analyze the ratio shown on certain risks or the integrity of the data. Here are three other ways you could apply the PMBOK® Guide principles to your meetings:
Have you used the PMBOK® Guide for lessons learned? How? |
Lessons Learned with External Teams
| Many companies only have internal projects, and therefore conduct lessons learned sessions with the same people. But what if you have an external project and you collaborate with team members outside of your organization? Should the project manager of the lead organization invite the outside project team to the closing project's lessons learned session? Here are three tips project managers can use to incorporate external project teams into their lessons learned: 1. Be discreet about company information, but target improvement. Before working on the project, there was likely some type of agreement with regard to proprietary information. This agreement should still be in effect for the lessons learned session. Before you host the lessons learned meeting, talk openly about the processes with the external team to help ensure your discussions are protected. 2. Stay focused on the project. Even during lessons learned sessions for internal project teams, attendees can veer off topic. Try not to argue about which organization was responsible for the mishaps or which company fell short on delivery. Focus on the issues: How can you better prepare project plans with outside parties? How can you review risk and issue lists together? What different criteria should be included in the scorecard that will bring value to monitoring the project and measuring the vendor relationship? 3. Build camaraderie. The two organizations may want to collaborate on a future project or enhancements to this closing project. Prepare questions that will allow the groups to work as one in the future. For example, how did the quality standards benefit evaluating the finished product? If the project relied heavily on documentation, is there any additional information that could be helpful? What communication methods may need to be revisited for the two companies to reach a decision in a timelier manner? If the third-party is holding separate post reviews on the same project, chances are valuable lessons from one group or the other are being missed. It is not uncommon for the lead organization to have an exclusive session in addition to a combined session. Having both groups present can be a favorable collaborative effort toward building vendor management best practices or improving the next project, the future vendor relationship or just a similar project situation. Does your organization include the external team in its lessons learned sessions? |