From October through mid December I was the lead trainer on complex building integration project. This project was part of larger corporate initiative to integrate another office supplies company that was bought out by my employer in July of 2008.
Overall, my project was a huge success! It was seen as one of the smoothest conversations/integration to date. Part of the reasons for success was that I had been a team member is several similar projects across the country and as part of those projects we did the post mortem project review.
Indirectly we did answer a lot of the question that are in Greer’s book The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! as part of our post mortem review. I think it’s imperative to ask questions as state by Greer like:
· What was the single most frustrating part of our project?
· How would you do things differently next time to avoid this frustration?
· Which of our methods or processes worked particularly well?
· Which of our methods or processes were difficult or frustrating to use?
· If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the project, what would you change?
(2010 p. 42)
The answers to the above questions outline a clear and successful plan for my manager and I to follow for our project.
One example of this would be, based off of previous project the physical inventory training tended to be a little confusing for the learn to comprehend. In the past it was delivered 1 hour prior to the associate going out and starting the process. The goal had been to deliver the training as close to the time need so there would be no lose in information retention. The take away was that it also only gave them one shot to learn a complex process with no practice activities or hand on experience.
My idea was to create a hands on practice activity that was done several times throughout the week leading up the physical inventory. The results were clear and undeniable that the ROI was well worth it. The inventory was the most accurate to date, and the learner time to mastery was a quarter of the time that it was in the past.
The success of my project was directly related to the success and failure of other projects. Being able to learn via a post-mortem review process exactly what could be better and also worked is imperative!
References:
Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.
Posts
Robert,
ReplyDeleteprior experience added to any process it always a benefit. No matter what level you are own in the process, you still have high level of responsibility for completing a project successfully. Using new strategies to complete the project, which has successful outcomes, will alway yield considerable savings to the company.
Robert,
ReplyDeleteOften, we are so pleased to reach the finish line that we may be tempted to just walk away when a project is finished. That's a mistake we can pay for in future projects.
Its clear that this project was easier, and worked better, because of things you learned in previous projects. Greer's postmortem questions indicate the importance of getting ready for the next project by learning as much as we can from the ones we're currently working on.
Portny et. al (2008) also advise keeping records of the people you needed to include in your project, by title,as opposed to by name, so that you can apply that list as a sort of template in future projects. Seems like a smart idea, and a good investment of our time.
Portny, S., Mantel, S., Meredith, J., Shafer, S., Sutton, M., & Kramer, B. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John E. Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hi Rob,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad your project was such a great success. Was there anything you would improve on next time? Or had you worked out the kinks during previous sessions, which made this one run so smoothly?
Cheers,
Joe
Joe,
ReplyDeleteActually we did have a few takeaways and just this last week they were able to see how successful the next project could be with even more knowledge.
I wasn't directly involved with the following project other then helping to implement a minor amount of distance learning which we didn't do in the previous project.
It was also interesting seeing other polite my ideas for the first time. It's hard to know how other will internalize ideas that aren't theirs.
-Rob
Joseph,
ReplyDeleteCongrats on your successful project! It sounds like you did what you needed to do in order to make sure it was a success. I like that you found something that wasn't working and changed it based on feedback. "A major benefit of using a formal project management approach is that needed expertise within the corporation can be identified and allocated to ensure that the project accomplishes its goals" (Murphy, 1994). It sounds like you had a plan in motion that ensured project success, and you took the information from your post mortem to improve any elements that weren't working well. I have never been a project manager before but agree that this is a useful tool for ensuring that the project is a success. Have you done many of these? It's good that you're using such an effective tool.
Angela
Murphy, C. (1994). Utilizing project management techniques in the design of instructional materials. Performance & Instruction, 33(3), 9–11.
Oops! Sorry Rob. I was looking at the wrong comment and accidently addressed my post to Joseph. I meant to start with your name.
ReplyDeleteAngela