The Professional Project Manager

Why do people insist on making the same mistakes over and over again? Why do project managers not take the time to learn from the experience of others and also to record their own experiences for the future?

This blog is all about the value of documenting and using lessons learned.

I dream of a perfect project management world where every time a project manager is given a new project to work, they spend those first few hours, or first day, sitting somewhere reading lessons learned from past projects learning what the previous project manager of the team did well and also learning but they didn't do so well. Imagine a world where you can then repeat their successes and avoid their failures. These lessons learned could be stored in a central database or library and be available as hard copy or a searchable electronic version.

Imagine reading about the experience of others in relation to choosing the right projects, getting the right project team members, defining risks on a project, accurate time and cost estimating, dealing with stakeholders, quality issues and any other aspect of the project. You would learn a lot and also get a real head start on project planning. If you don’t do it, you are condemned to reinventing the wheel again and again.

Gathering lessons learned as a relatively easy process. You can start to do it at any point in a project; you don't need to wait for the end. You can do it formally through structured interviews, surveys and feedback sessions. You can also do it informally through your own observations. Obviously in order to do it successfully you need to plan to do it along with all your other project activities, and as such you need to have time, and perhaps money, set aside to carry out the work associated with gathering, documenting and storing these gems. The cost to any project of doing this work is easily offset by the direct savings and efficiencies gained on both future projects and an overall increase in organizational knowledge, wisdom and efficiency.

In addition to the lessons learned gathered during and at the completion of the project, one of the most underrated pieces of lessons learned is the post implementation review which in my experience is just not done often enough. The real value in completing a post-implementation review is to revisit the project some time after it's been completed and you check whether it did it achieve the things that you thought it would achieve. Too many people make the assumption that delivering the intended project output results in the planned outcomes. A simple post implementation review conducted 6 months later will reveal whether it did or not, and contribute to your future project selection, planning and execution.

So, start recording your lessons learned right now. Sit down and start a document and add to it over the course of your project. Encourage your colleagues to do the same and over time you will build up an impressive collection of data that will help increase the chances of project success.

More and more research clearly indicates that organizations with a PMO deliver more successful projects than organizations without a PMO, yet that same research also tells us that a lot of organizations fail to see the benefits of a PMO, and some organizations are even getting rid of their PMO’s. They see them as an unnecessary expense rather than the investment that they actually are.

Keep in mind that PMO is not a single standardized thing - what it is will reflect the level of project management maturity, your industry and the size, complexity and duration of the projects you undertake. It may be anything from a single ring binder full of templates through to a specific part of the organization that controls all aspect of project management. The one thing that all forms of PMO have in common is that they are the center for project management excellence in the organization.

Now, we as professional project managers know that we can do our jobs much better when supported by a PMO. But how do we go about establishing one in the when top level management fails to see the benefits? How about a stealth PMO or perhaps a VPMO – the V can stand for volunteer or virtual?

Here are three simple achievable steps to creating your own stealth or virtual PMO:

1. Establish a project management users group in your organization. Invite all project managers to be part of it. Then schedule regular meetings – a good idea is 4pm on the 4^th Friday on each month, or a breakfast meeting - and supply some refreshments for people. Have a specific topic to talk about – it could be improving your change control, standardizing templates, lessons learned and updates to your project management methodology. Invite a speaker to attend to present on a particular topic. Have someone document the meeting and follow up on any agreed actions.

2. Get the project managers to take responsibility for documenting your project management methodology and then volunteering to carry out audits on each other’s projects.

3. And most importantly of all, when your do deliver successful projects attribute your success to the support you have received from the VPMO or users group or whatever it is you want to call it. Let the decision makers higher up see the value. Your goal is to get them to support not just a PMO but also professional project management within the organization so don’t be shy about blowing your own trumpet. Take care to first prove the worth of the PMO to practitioners and the organization before trying to get financial support for a more complex form of a PMO, or even a paid PMO manager position.

Remember that this stealth or virtual PMO will be your first PMO so it doesn’t have to be overly complex. The main goal is to prove its worth and get support for a more complex one.

Let me know how you go with this idea, and it you have any other suggestions for getting a PMO off the ground in your organization.

Have you ever played the game of dominos? I did many years ago and I was never very good at it. If you remember the game, it involves trying to place your dominoes in some sort of order to block and beat your opponent. The other great thing you can do with dominoes is balance them on their edge, line them up, push the first one over and watch the cascading effect as one falling domino causing the next to fall. If one domino fails to fall or is missing, then then no other dominoes will fall. There are some great world records set for this and if you have time take a look online.

Anyway, the point of that preamble is to rather clumsily introduce the idea of connected, interconnected and dependent events. It’s a particularly important concept when looking at achieving organizational strategy. Achieving strategic success is not simply a matter of defining the strategy and then sitting back and watching it happen.  A series of interconnected events needs to occur to ensure that strategic success occurs. In fact, there are many variables that contribute to strategic success but for the purpose of clarity and brevity I am going to focus on the link between strategic success and organizational project management capability.

Organizational project management capability refers to what practices and processes the organization has to assist with successful portfolio, program and project management. The individual components of organization project management capability are many and varied, and listing them all would take up the rest of this blog but it does include the following elements:

• Portfolio management techniques for selecting and prioritizing the right projects.
• Organization wide support for project management – a move to Total Project Management (TPM) which is like the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM).
• The right PMO for the organization right now
• A talent management strategy for assessing and improving individual practitioner capability
• An organizational project management methodology
• Individual tailored project management methodologies including tools techniques and templates

If you view achieving strategy as the final domino to fall you must ensure that all the parts of appropriate organizational project management are in place and playing their part. They must be in place and ‘fall’ first in order to achieve your strategic objectives.

What this means is that you need to begin to view organizational project management capability as a key management tool for achieving strategic initiatives. You need to see the interconnected relationship between strategy and project management. You need to foster and strengthen the links between C level executives setting the strategy and practitioners at all levels charged with delivering the projects which deliver that strategy.

So, take some time to make those clear links between individual elements of your organizational strategy and the specific parts of organizational project management capability that will contribute to delivering them. Focus on the weak areas of each and my final tip is to begin the process by only choosing those projects that align with and deliver organizational strategy.