Here is my takeaway #33 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:
33) “One of the top reasons for formally closing out your projects is to document what you have learned along the way. To do this right you need to do another interview–this time with your core team. It’s a good idea also to invite anyone who has to live with the results…The agenda for this interview is simple:
- What was done well?”
- What needs to be done better or differently?
- What unexpected risks did we have to deal with?
- How does our process need to change to meet goals in the future?”
Note: This comes from Chapter 7 “Closing the Project: End Happily–or Just End?” (pages 197)
I love learning, growing, and progressing! The most successful professionals are always learning. The main thing you will take away from each project is a newfound understanding about one thing or another that you can use to improve the way you accomplish new projects. Document it! Share it! Apply it!
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STORY TIME:
I mentored a new process improvement specialist when I headed up a couple organizational knowledge management projects. He came in at the perfect timing from my perspective. We were right at the tail end of one process/project with a new process/project about to begin. I used this opportunity to compile notes of Lesson’s Learned throughout the previous organizational project and showed him how I wanted it cleaned up and organized to provide us something actionable for future organizational projects. We turned these insights in, and it was a significant boon to future project management efforts.
Our summary basically cataloged subjects and outlined what challenges we faced, was done well, what was not done well, and what we would recommend for the better. He did an excellent job! It also gave him everything he needed to get up-to-speed with our business processes and where our organization was at in its change project management maturity. And then he had several great ideas to improve our processes, right out of the gates from his launching point.
He continued on to be an integral part of other project teams assisting executives and middle managers to introduce and enable better processes for our Business Process Outsourcer (BPO). He contributed significantly to company SOPs (Policies, Processes, and Procedures), trainings, and to our Knowledge Base. He was an integral part of our organization connecting better practices with our new partner company.
Note: I would have preferred to also have had a formal close out meeting, but I think notes and action items I had recorded from all previous meetings I had been a part of, told the story quite well. Since these were corporate-level projects and our positions were limited in authority and participation, our perspective was treated more like outside recommendations of an external audit. I don’t think that company ever fully came together as a team to reach their full potential, or fully valued the knowledge management improvements we orchestrated, but any improvement was a good thing.
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It all started with Lessons Learned, a willingness for our teams to do things differently once we learned something new together, and then managing our shared knowledge in a format and place where it could benefit everyone.