PROJECT MANAGEMENT AT A GLANCE those who preceded us handled it. This may be as simple as, “We used XYZ vendor for wiring and they were horrible! Never use them again.” Or the situation might have involved a very specific software setting that caused a problem for a development team. The lesson might just as well concern a very successful process or project innovation, such as, “We studied every article and followed all suggestions on project management in Public Sector Excellence Magazine and our project ran without a hitch.” The point is, Lessons Learned can be positive or negative. Anything the project team learned that might possibly help another future project should be documented. Not only should they be documented, the information should be readily and easily available to future project personnel. It does no one any good for a paper list of lessons learned to be filed in a cardboard box in an offsite warehouse. With today’s technology, there is absolutely no reason every lesson learned from every project cannot be entered in an indexed database, easily searchable by keywords. People love to give advice and tell others of their experiences—IF—they believe that advice and experience is actually going to do someone some good. A project team will approach a lessons learned information gathering session with extreme cynicism if they believe their comments will be filed in a dark corner of an obscure warehouse. But if they know that their wisdom will live for future generations
and be useful and actually used by others, they will put every effort into documenting successes and failures.
Yes, but… Yes, but some projects do not complete successfully. There are as many possible reasons for this as there are failed projects and there always seems to be sufficient blame to pass around so that nobody needs to go back to their office without at least a little egg on their face when a project “has gone south.” Scope creep, those seemingly insignificant changes and additions to the project, may have become an unbearable weight, causing the entire project to crash and burn. Unmanageable risks may have become issues that could not be overcome. Key personnel may have left the company. Costs, for whatever reason, may have spiraled out of control.
project became unnecessary or another project requiring the budget and personnel became more important or urgent. Whatever the cause, most of the above closure activities still have to be carried out. The difference being, rather than have the project customer sign off on final deliverables, they may be asked to sign off on a statement of partially completed deliverables or other agreements or statements of understanding. The issue is that all parties have to know the status of the project so that they can make plans for limited, or no, project deliverables. Part of the close process will be an evaluation of all costs that will be incurred if cancelation of procurement contracts incurs penalties.
It may simply be the case that business conditions changed; the
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Issue 5 - MAY 2015