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7.6 Conclusion
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Lessons Learned: The purpose of lessons learned is the same as the processes before but they document the successes and failures of the project, too. As an example, lessons learned documents the reasons why specific corrective actions were taken, unplanned risks that occurred, mistakes that were made and could have been avoided.
There are facts that can be learned from failed projects as well as successful projects and this information, whether good or bad, should be documented for future reference. Often this work is not done because a lot of employees don’t want to admit to making mistakes or learning from mistakes made during the project. It could be disagreeable to associate their name with failed projects or even mistakes.
Organisations that do not document lessons learned probably do conduct post-implementation audits.
Documenting and gathering information during this procedure can serve the same function as lessons learned if they include the good and the bad alike. Post-implementation audits aren’t an official output, but they go hand in hand with lessons learned as they examine the project from beginning to end and look at what went right and what went wrong.
At the conclusion of the project the team members will be released and return to their functional managers or new projects. This release is a non-official process but it should be noted at the end of the project.
When the project is getting closer to completion the managers should be informed what the schedule looks like so that they can start planning activities and scheduling activity dates.
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The two processes in the closing group are contract closeout and administrative closure. Contract closeout is performed before administrative closure and is concerned with settling the contract and completing the contract according to its terms. Its two outputs are contract file and formal acceptance and closure.
Administrative closure is performed at the end of each phase of the project as well as at the end of the project. Administrative closure involves documenting formal acceptance and disseminating notice of acceptance to the stakeholders, customer and others. All documentation gathered during the project and collected during this process is archived and saved for reference purposes on future projects.
Lessons learned documents the successes and failures of the project. Many times lessons learned are not documented because staff members do not want to assign their names to project errors or failures.
Documenting these “learned from past” experiences can avoid the repetition of the same errors in new projects.
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360° thinking .
Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers
© Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities.
360° thinking .
Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers
© Deloitte & Touche LLP and affiliated entities.
360° thinking .
Discover the truth at www.deloitte.ca/careers
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8 Final Remarks and further Readings
I hope this book provided you with some helpful tools and examples with which to achieve faster and better results in your project work. There are certain different approaches as to how to best handle project management and the approach used in this book is based upon my experiences, which may vary from the experience of other project managers. However, there is one point on which all experts will come to the same conclusion: When you are undertaking project management, do it professionally and be always willing to accept the knowledge gained from the project experience of other people. As shown in this book, project managements covers so many areas of expertise that rarely can any one person be found who is the master of all of them.
Also, certain topics which I also regard as quite important could only be touched upon in this book, e.g.
project management software or management approaches to project management. If you are interested in learning more about project management, I have found the following books extremely helpful as they cover a broad range of project management experiences and manage to bridge the gap between practical approaches and theoretical knowledge. I have also used some of these approaches in designing my lectures and therefore they have also been of great use when putting together this book:
Duncan, W.R.: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, Project Management Institute, Upper Darby; 1996.
Gray, Clifford F. and Erik W. Larson: Project Management – The managerial process; 4th edition; New York, 2008.
Johansson, Henry J. et.al.: Business Process Reengineering: BreakPoint Strategies for Market Dominance;
John Wiley & Sons; 1993.
Kerzner, Harold: Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling;
9th edition; New Jersey; 2006.
Schwalbe, Cathy: Introduction to Project Management; 2nd edition; Boston; 2009.
and last but not least the homepage of the Project Management Institute www.pmi.org.