Learning Lessons from Projects

    After a project team completes a work effort, they should determine what aspects went well and which aspects they can improve in future projects. Project management and portfolio management are becoming more prevalent in companies across industries (“The Role of Project Management,” 2013). The ability to effectively manage knowledge is a challenge for every organization (Terzieva & Morabito, 2016). To review how smoothly a project goes and document the lessons for future use, project managers hold a post-mortem meeting (Greer, 2010). Project teams should take the time to reconvene and gather the lessons they learned from in completing the project.

    A project I worked on that was not a success was a new hire curriculum for customer service representatives in a call center of an insurance company. One aspect of the training project that went wrong was that the scope changed three times because additional managers wanted their new hires to be included. The scope creep contributed to the project’s failure because the lead designers had to keep going back to revise the design to ensure that the content was general enough to apply to the newly intended audiences. To be more successful, the project manager could have spent more time and effort seeking out additional stakeholders interested in the same training. Scope creep on projects is caused by many reasons (Laureate Education, Inc., n.d.). Another way that the project could have been more successful would be if the leadership team who were the project’s sponsors should discuss their need for common training in the monthly meetings their monthly strategy meetings. Project managers should involve all stakeholders from the beginning of a project to avoid rework (Greer, 2010). Identifying all of the stakeholders in the beginning would have helped because the sponsors may coordinated a core curriculum made up of common training needs across all of the teams. 

    The sponsors decided to fold the project into a larger project that was already underway to develop new hire training for call center employees that was more general. I reworked the two deliverables I was developing by updating the nomenclature and changing the scenarios to be less specific to customer questions and references to software tools. The project manager handled the work by adding a week for instructional development. The rework could have been avoided if the project manager and sponsors had reviewed the broader training needs of their departments to see if similar work was already in progress. This would have helped because they could have folded the resources from the project I was on into the larger project earlier and avoided the extra resources it took to rework the content to fit the broader audience. In a post-mortem, a project manager gathers information from the project team members about which practices and processes could be repeated and improved (Greer, 2010). Project team members can document the lessons they learn so that they do not repeat the same mistakes in the future. Capturing implicit knowledge is essential for knowledge management in modern corporations (Terzieva & Morabito, 2016). Project managers should revisit the lessons learned before their next project to determine what efficiencies they can incorporate in their following  projects.

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! Laureate Education, Inc. http://michaelgreer.biz/?page_id=636

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practitioner voices: Overcoming scope creep [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Terzieva, M., & Morabito, V. (2016). Learning from Experience: The Project Team is the Key. Business Systems Research, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1515/bsrj-2016-0001

The Role of Project Management in the Execution of Corporate Strategy. (2013). Leader to Leader, 2013(69), 61–62.

Comments

  1. kaseyash77November 12, 2021 at 5:16 PM

    Mary,
    After reading though your new hire curriculum for a call center of an insurance company, did you have any postmortem analyses. The process of evaluating a project and comparing it with the expected outcomes would be essential in highlighting the weaknesses and critical areas in the data analysis.

    Best Regards,
    Kash

    ReplyDelete
  2. Think About It. Be About It.November 14, 2021 at 6:06 PM

    Hi Mary,

    In your scenario, an analysis should have been completed to determine the scope of the problem and if actions were already underway to find a solution. ID project managers must ask the sponsor how it was determined that this training project is the best solution for the perceived problem. Ideally, there would have been a continuous improvement team that completed a process to assess based on analysis that training was the best solution for the organization, not just one department. However, sponsors often decide to initiate a project in a silo without surveying peers to see if the problem is unique or familiar. As a PM, it is essential to ask tough questions in the initial meeting to encourage them to consider the scope and impact of the project (Greer, 1992).

    Reference
    Greer, M., 1992. ID project management: tools and techniques for instructional designers and developer. Educational Technology Publication, Inc.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Airyn LongoriaNovember 14, 2021 at 10:40 PM

    Mary,
    Scope creep is a common issue when managing a project since it causes the vision of the project to be skewed. In this situation, the Project Manager should have talked to the client to remind them of what was agreed upon and arrange to add their ideas once the project is more developed or in a later project (Laureate Education, Inc., n.d.).

    References
    Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Project management concerns: ‘Scope creep’ [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

    ReplyDelete

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