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Essential Project Management
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8 Traits of Top Project Managers - Part 1
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Agile Project Management - Engaging Your Customer!
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9 Tips to Avoid Traps in Project Planning
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Why Projects Succeed - Executive Sponsorship
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On Customer Participation in Agile Projects
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A Project Charter for Lazy Teams
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The Power of Process: How Bad Project Management Kills Great Ideas
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The Benefits of Virtual Project Management
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Lessons Learned and the Project Council
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Project Vaccination
January 8, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings
Project Vaccination
By John Duff
It’s flu season here in North America, time for many people to get their annual precautionary flu shots. Vaccination, of course, allows the body to “learn” from other infections and to build its own defenses in anticipation of being attacked by the real thing.
Projects can be treated in the same way, improving their resistance to risks and allowing them to perform more consistently and at a higher level.
The vaccine in this case is first-hand feedback on the successes and failures experienced with other projects: How the addition of a new customer checkpoint allowed them to be better prepared for delivery; how rearranging a sequence of tasks reduced the overall project schedule; how rescheduling user training helped reduce help desk calls; etc. etc. Capturing these Best Practices and re-using them in subsequent projects avoids re-inventing the wheel or repeating past mistakes (mistakes will still happen, but hopefully they will become unique!)
Repeatable and consistent project delivery across the portfolio has benefits beyond the success of any particular project: it leads to more accurate forecasts of overall income and resources, which then feeds a virtuous cycle of more stable investment and employment, which in turn leads to more engaged employees using their cumulative knowledge to further improve delivery performance.
At the same time, capturing project feedback also creates an environment of continuous improvement and adaptation resulting from real-world experiences and trends in the market.
Informal project feedback can work in small teams, where word of mouth spreads easily and individual reputation provides natural selection for the best practices. However, this does not scale up well for larger enterprises, where the number of staff makes individual learning haphazard at best. Instead, more formalized collaboration networks must be formed, with owners assigned to capture and filter the Best Practices into standard checklists, templates and boilerplate documents that then form the starting point for all new project plans or proposals.
It all sounds simple and obvious. Yet, despite their well-publicized benefits, it’s amazing how each year so many people skip getting a flu shot.
John Duff, BSc (Electronic Eng), MBA has more than 20 years experience is SW development, Project Management and Global Professional Services Delivery for both large multinational and mid-sized technology companies. He was born, educated and started his career in the UK, but has lived in the US for the last 18 years. He is committed to helping companies increase their customer satisfaction and operational excellence through cross-functional collaboration and innovation of new tools and processes. Read other articles from John on his blog at www.TheProcessOfProjects.com.
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1 person has left a comment
Hi John - I agree w/ you - lessons learned can definitely help vaccinate all your future projects. I think when a project manager is done the act of closing is so celebratory they don’t want to deal with the finished project anymore. Valuable information can be lost, as I was recently telling a fellow PM friend of mine. Your readers might also want to see http://www.steelray.com/blog/?p=3