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| Freedom from
Project Surprises Newsletter - Issue #43 |
November 2008 |
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You
work in a modern organization making extensive use of formal program
management methodologies such as PMBOK or PRINCE2. You have documented
processes for your
projects and feel that your organization would rate high marks getting
new products to market. So how are you at learning from previous
projects and affecting changes based on that knowledge? Based on broad
industry research the answer is likely to be an unexcited "OK, but we
need to be better". This month's newsletter will focus on the lessons
learned process.
Do you know if your organization is living the "lessons learned lie"?
Read on to find out.
Jeff Jorvig, NPD Process Consultant
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News of Interest
- Registration for our "IC Design Skills for Project Managers"
webinar closes on November 5th. Email me a list of your four
greatest project challenges I will send you information for registering
at half of the standard fee.
- Discovery
& Solution Case Study of one of our engagements here.
- Check out this interesting article titled "How Do Organizations Learn Lessons From
Projects-And Do They?" in the May 2008 issue (Vol 55 Issue 2) of
IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management.
- Check out this web
based
solution to managing your NPD/NPI process here.
- Check out our quick
start instant downloads for managing design
projects.
Leadership Quote of the month:
"A
good leader inspires people to have confidence in their leader. A
great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves."
--Anonymous |
The Lessons Learned Lie
It
is likely that every organization has some type of lessons learned
methodology in place to assess previous projects. Output of this
process is assumed to be positive changes in the way future projects
are handled. Some may call this activity project postmortems, however
the objective is the same; to identify areas for improvement and to
take note of what worked well. Do keep in mind that a postmortem should
only be considered a subset activity in an ideal lesson's learned
framework.
Most organizations will minimally capture the most
obvious project challenge areas via a lessons assessment. Some will
implement changes to those challenges and others purely retain a
learning for future reference. The more in depth challenges tend to
remain elusive to most organizations lesson's learned process,
remaining undiscovered because the process to uncover them was not
comprehensive enough. In the majority of cases either the lessons
learned depth is not sufficient to expose low level systemic issues, or
many of the learning's never lead to a positive change in future
projects. Where does your organization stand on the quality of lessons
learned?
The
practice of lessons learned in a New Product Development process is not
an indicator that an organization's development process is optimized or
even close to optimized; believing otherwise is one aspect of the
"lessons learned lie".
The overall effectiveness of the
learning's process varies greatly, with most agreeing that there is a
large gap between what is being done and what could be done. A lack of
time is the primary reason that I hear for limited quality of lessons
learned. This is really more of an excuse than a reason. The
fact is if there is time for unknown challenges to impact projects in
ways that can't even be fathomed, there is certainly time to learn
about and fix them. Not enough time to properly assess a project
and make changes is another facet of the "lessons learned lie".
Effective
top down support of a lessons learned strategy comes down to an
unreserved sponsorship of a continuous improvement culture and mindset.
Either an organization is doing it, or they are talking about doing it.
One provides visible results  and
the other is a smoke screen promising better results tomorrow, a
tomorrow that never comes. Management support of a high quality
continuous improvement environment will be rewarded with a never-ending
stream of incremental improvements in project execution.
Toyota
has set the standard for making lessons learned work in auto
manufacturing. Consider setting a new standard for lessons learned in
your organization by means of this clear-cut leadership attitude:
positive emphasis on the value of thorough learning's and their
application to continuous improvement. If competition is whittling away
an organizations future, it's time to come to terms with the "lessons
learned lie". Is your organization up for the challenge in revving up
lessons learned to become a major player in continuous improvement?
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Revving
up
your Lessons Learned Methodology
If
your lessons learned process is not making a visible impact on future
projects it might be time to make some changes to your process. The
most common forum for project learning's is post project meetings or
postmortems.  Enriching
the effectiveness of lessons learned should include formal project
audits, project diaries, team member interviews, checklists/travelers
or the use of an external facilitator. I will expand on a few of these
additions below.
Project Audits
Project
audits are merely a formalized approach at evaluating a projects
execution. Where things did not go as planned, root cause analysis is
critical to identify the remedy for future projects. Audits are much
more time intensive that the standard postmortem approach, providing a
commensurate improvement to the exposure potential of project
challenges. A 3rd part audit will provide the greatest benefit due to
the lack of any preconceived notions about how the project went.
Project Diaries or
Journals
In
this case everyone on the project would maintain their own journal of
thoughts, ideas and problems throughout the project. This increases the
effectiveness of lessons learned since no ones memory plays a role in
the quality of the assessment. I don't know about you, but for me
anything that removes a dependence on memory is a good thing. This one
is pretty simple and effective, assuming you can influence your team to
write things down in a nearly real time fashion.
Team Member
Interviews
I
would merge this in with a formal project audit to improve the depth of
the assessments. During the interview you need to craft questions that
would enable project challenges to bubble up during the discussion.
Most of the effort here is the preparation of the high quality,
challenge uncovering questions to pose. There is a lot to learn from
the members involved in a project.
External Facilitator
Having
someone unbiased by the project will always provide a much clearer
vision of how the project went. For this reason I would suggest using
someone outside the project to facilitate postmortems, audits as well
as interviews. This also brings a fresh perspective to the analysis,
always a good thing.
One aspect of lessons learned that is
extremely important is this. Any item identified out of lessons learned
must generate a specific action that will be tracked to closure. A
lesson learned will have little value if it does not lead to a decision
and plan for incorporating it for future projects. The objective is not
that a lesson has been captured; it is how you have changed your
development process based on the learning. Lessons learned must be an
action-enabling activity!
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| How we
can Help
"Providing solutions to the hidden, behind the scenes project
roadblocks that quietly steal early revenue opportunity"
- Lessons
Learned -
We can work with you to setup up a lessons learned environment that
provides a continuous stream of results.
- Project
Postmortem - We can provide the thorough, in depth analysis to
uncover the root issues in one of your completed projects.
- Leanings
Facilitator - Allow us to be a 3rd party facilitator for
interviews, audits or postmortems for refreshing view of project
execution.
- Discovery -
Are you certain that you know everything that is impacting project
execution? We are expert private investigators at uncovering the
unknowns in an organizations development process.
- NPD team workshop to improve planning, execution and monitoring skills.
- Web based NPD workflow management.
- Ready made downloads:
schedule, checklist, analog design guide.
- Increase design management bandwidth via Virtual Design Manager.
- Full listing of common services here.
Contact us today via email, 480-895-0478 or
877-895-0478 |
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Feedback
To increase the value of this newsletter for you I would like
to hear your comments.
- What do you like or not like about this
newsletter?
- What subjects would you like to see covered in
the future?
- How is the format?
- Ask a question and I will anonymously post and
answer it here in this section.
Please email me here with any questions,
comments or suggestions that will help me better serve my readers. I
would enjoy hearing from you.
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