Discuss the tools and techniques that project managers can use to ensure knowledge and lessons
learned from previous projects are not lost, and can be shared for the benefit of future projects. Everything learned from previous projects, whether they were successes or failures can teach a project manager important lessons. And individual project managers usually do learn from their own previous experiences, but how can these “lessons learned” be shared with others within the project team or within the same organisation? If they are shared, how do other project managers apply the lessons to their own projects?
I think project review should be conducted; it will involve an internal review of project performance, undertaken primarily by the project team as part of the completion phase. The object will be to identify strengths and weaknesses in respect of future projects. In addition, project members should perhaps be rotated to ensure that the "lessons learned" are understood by other staffs as well and can be applied by anyone in the project team to avoid similar issues in the future.
Dr.Simon has mentioned multiple times the importance of this in his lectures. It is part of the project manager's responsibility to create a log of some sorts which details everything that worked and everything that failed during the course of the project. This should be done during the closing phase of the project and stored in the Design History File as part of the organizational process assets. This will help project managers in the future understand your methods and plan their own course of action based off of your experience. Lots of time and money can be wasted by people repeating the mistakes of others attempting similar tasks in the same company. This is a very important principle but sometimes fails when people are lazy and will need to be passed on by word of mouth. This is an essential part of any closing phase that the members reflect on what happened.
It is very important to ensure that every member of a project team is aware of any challenges other members have overcome in order to avoid repeated mistakes. In many instances, each individual member of a project team will end up filling a "niche" by becoming the go-to person for specific tasks that play to their strengths. However if that individual becomes unavailable and another team member has to take over with completing tasks they are completely unfamiliar with, they will have to start from square one. From my industry experience, when my project manager would conduct weekly status meetings, it was a great time for all members of the team to come together and discuss any roadblocks they may have encountered. And as the previous post stated, recording a log can also be effective since lessons learned can be clearly documented for reference not only for the current project, but for future projects as well. The Project Manager can accomplish this by keeping up with recording meeting minutes throughout the course of the project, and compiling them when the project concludes.
Discuss the tools and techniques that project managers can use to ensure knowledge and lessons
learned from previous projects are not lost, and can be shared for the benefit of future projects. Everything learned from previous projects, whether they were successes or failures can teach a project manager important lessons. And individual project managers usually do learn from their own previous experiences, but how can these “lessons learned” be shared with others within the project team or within the same organisation? If they are shared, how do other project managers apply the lessons to their own projects?
I think project review should be conducted; it will involve an internal review of project performance, undertaken primarily by the project team as part of the completion phase. The object will be to identify strengths and weaknesses in respect of future projects. In addition, project members should perhaps be rotated to ensure that the "lessons learned" are understood by other staffs as well and can be applied by anyone in the project team to avoid similar issues in the future.
It's commonly said that you learn more from your failures than your successes, and I think that's definitely true. When you fail at something, it tends to stick with you more and you identify areas of improvement, whereas when you succeed at something, you may tend to take it for granted. I think sharing lessons learned is a great way to avoid repeating mistakes in future projects. As a project manager, one technique you could implement is scheduling a lessons learned presentation at certain stages within the project. Depending on the size of the company, you may have multiple projects being worked on at once, all of which may be at different stages of the development process. So, if your project team completed a certain milestone that another project team will need to complete in the future, you could hold a lessons learned meeting for that project team to let them know what worked well in your project, and also make them aware of certain hurdles your team had to overcome. More importantly, you can share HOW your team overcame those challenges. Additionally, it's important to have a good onboarding process for new team members, so they know of these challenges ahead of time and how to address them should they come up.
I agree with the ideas mentioned above, however, what I wanted to point out , which I don't think has been mentioned so far it that perhaps prior to initiation of the project itself, the team should have a decent knowledge of the of the set back that occurred during a similar project conducted by another team. Instead of dealing and managing through the issues when they actually arise, I think anticipating those setbacks will be a little more proactive and save the team a lot of time ( and perhaps stress) during the project life cycle. Of course, not all setbacks can be anticipated, as some unforeseen circumstances do occur sometime. Ye, the goal of the project reside in have 100% efficacy and efficiency , so having a contingent plan of course could be quite beneficial in case they do occur.
One thing I agree with that was mentioned is a thorough onboarding process that can let any new hires, co-ops or interns know of issues before they arise. In my limited industry experience, a good onboarding process helped me tackle some problems early on as I got acquainted with the information and the issues surrounding some projects while working some of the old co-ops that were leaving my position - so I could always go to them for assistance. This gave me the confidence to tackle problems on my own later. Another thing that I am not sure has been mentioned is clear and open communication and proper team culture that doesn't make an effort to judge mistakes that occurred in the task completion process but views them as avenues to grow and learn. I have seen too often where people would try and solve an issue they were struggling with by themselves to avoid the risk of facing ridicule and shame from their peers and managers. This relates to this topic because the fear I am speaking of can lead to multiple mistakes being repeated over and over as people are too afraid to discuss their mistakes and truly learn from them in order to improve in the future.
Mistakes happen, How a team deals with and learn from them is what determines if the team will eventually become a winning team. There are some common project management mistakes and how to avoid them: - Assigning the wrong person to manage the project. - lack of resources and skills. - Doing everything yourself. - Failure to communicate properly. - Poor project initiation. - Failure to manage project scope.
Everyone falls victim to unintended mistakes at work, but few have the skill to deal with mistakes.
Project managers must take the responsibility and face the mistakes that affect the project and causes delay
There are many reasons for these mistakes
For example:
1-The lack of a good project start
2-Lack of planning and Non-compliance with the work plan
3-selection of unsuitable team members:
The first two errors are results of the third because Inappropriate team members do not mean that they are not efficient but mean that they do not know how to work with each other ,what is the responsibility of each one of them and how to work with a colleague.
the project manager must give each team member a specific job, tell them at a weekly meeting what progress made on the project and how they can work together to avoid mistakes.
It was said " If you are not making mistakes, then you are not doing anything." Doing mistakes is part of learning to do things the right way, but you need to admit first for yourself that you can make mistakes like everyone else (ego is a bit challenging in this part). Best way to Make use of old mistakes, is to understand the mistake that happen from different perspective and do some analysis. I agree with Moving team members between different projects, but this will not be helpful if the members have no idea what went wrong or what was the solution, which leads again for having good communication and team work.
In addition, Creative thinking sessions can be held in the organization having different teams lead by Project managers with different people from different projects to participate, were they can speak freely discussing problem and there solutions with the there experience.
It is said over time like, Failure is the stepping stone to success and I think it is obviously true. As mistakes happen over time, but it should be concerned that the team should learn from its mistake and it should not happen over again. There are certain mistakes like poor project initiation, wrong person in managing the project, failure to communicate properly, lacking clear objective etc. It is also important that every member in the team should be aware of the tasks that every other member do in the team.
In my experience, a great way to avoid repeated mistakes on company projects as a whole is strategic team building. When managers staff the different phases in projects, it's important that they pull a diverse group of people from various other teams in order to build a bridge of communication between different branches in the company.
In the companies I've worked for, we always have weekly one-on-ones with managers. In these meetings, our managers discuss our responsibilities and goals related to projects we're on, as well as the progress of the project as a whole. These "informal" meetings give us the time to give detailed information to our managers. They take notes that they keep for future projects, and when our teams meet we share this information. The more branches involved in projects, the more information is shared and used to better ourselves as a company.
During my Capstone senior design project, my team rotated the role of PM so that each of us had an opportunity to act as PM and learn the role. This differs from many of the experiences discussed in the sense that we did not have one PM for the entire project who then logged any problems as well as things that worked well. We were completing this as a team throughout the entire project. As a PM team member and not the PM, I found it effective to constantly be up to date on tasks that went wrong and how those were addressed. We also used a transition technique when switching PMs in which the previous PM met individually with the new PM and discussed what they found effective, how they responded to problems, and anything that they thought would be useful for the new PM to avoid mistakes. Although many PM positions do not rotate as frequently as this, I think this transition technique could be adapted to be useful for companies as well. If there is good communication between PMs of various teams and programs, each PM may be able to learn from the mistakes and successes of others before making those mistakes themselves.
There is no way to totally avoid mistakes. However, as previously mentioned before that the project manager experience plays the essential role to avoid mistakes, but some mistakes happen in the lower departments that require experts employees at the head of the department. Selecting the project manager and department heads are done in the first two phases, the initiation and planning phases, in order to avoid mistakes in the rest of the phases.
I agree with mentioned ideas above just want to add two other points. First: the wrong estimation of time and budget, sometimes in project managing we go overboard when it comes to estimating the budget and time of a project, we need to be expert in this area or at least always ask and get experts advice (especially if this is our first time). Second: failure to change direction especially when we're trying to cover up-whether or not the project is at risk. That can be difficult, especially when there are so many high hopes in planning for what the finished product or service or anything else can do. Communication, reporting, and transparency become even more important if a project is on the slippery slope towards failure.
I agree with many of the ideas above stating that a log should be created and so on, but I also think that the project manager should incorporate discussing mistakes, failures, and how those failures were dealt with into the team's general, "culture". I.e, writing things down is one thing, making these failures well known and discussing them actively is another. In that, the team manager shouldn't just record these mistakes, but should actively teach team members about them as to avoid them in the future. There also needs to be an environment that allows for team members to admit mistakes.
