Financial Management Specialist | US Peace CorpsYaounde, Centre, Cameroon
What experience did you have running similar projects but with no similar results or outcomes?
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Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Kwiyuh, I think similar projects producing different outcomes may be where some of the most valuable learning begins, because they force us to question what we thought we had learned about cause and effect.
The challenge is that similarity can be deceptive. Two projects may share scope, technology, methodology or even many of the same practices while differing materially in context, dependencies, decision rights, stakeholder dynamics, assumptions or uncertainty.
That is why I would be cautious about turning outcomes directly into lessons. The same practice followed by different results does not necessarily mean the practice worked in one project and failed in the other. We need to investigate what mechanisms may have contributed to each outcome, under which conditions, and what evidence supports those causal interpretations.
Perhaps the most transferable lesson is therefore not simply “what worked,” but what worked, under which conditions, why we believe it worked, and when we should expect it to work again. Saving Changes...
Financial Management Specialist | US Peace CorpsYaounde, Centre, Cameroon
Thanks Luis, You response is very insightful and triggers another issue. about PMs being cautious about turning outcomes directly into lessons. Saving Changes...
Neglecting to remain vigilant about what has changed in the context of one project to a virtually identical earlier one is effectively treating your project as an operational activity or predictable process which means you are abdicating your role as a PM! Processes can be controlled when nearly all of the variables which contribute to uncertainty are controlled. By definition, that is not possible with projects.
When managing portfolios, there are often similar projects with very different outcomes. Sometimes that is because they are not similar in the ways that resulted in the success. In engineering projects, that might be because the underlying technology that made Project A successful does not apply to Project B, or can't be exploited the same way. The same is true of different contract types, organizational partnerships, regulatory issues, or any number of things. On the surface the projects look similar, but as they say, the devil is in the details. 95% similar doesn't help when the 5% difference prevents you from achieving critical requirements.
Program Manager| HARPER SRLSanto Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
The difference was usually in the context: stakeholder involvement, team dynamics, decision-making speed, organizational priorities, or even how much support the project had from leadership. It taught me not to assume that because an approach worked well in one project, it will produce the same result in the next one. Saving Changes...
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