Lesson learned: Use real life samples to make training more effective.
Category: Training / skills development.
The following post is a “Lesson Learned” that comes from the analysis of the failed projects documented in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” or from the experiences the editorial team have had working with clients around the world. The post is published here to spark discussion and help individuals and organizations think about what it takes to improve project success rates.
In...
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Social Learning
Being something of a Systems Thinker, I often find myself reflecting on events to see if I can understand the cause and effect relationships that drive the outcomes we attain. Working in the field of education, that interest has caused me to look deeply into the way individuals learn and how different modes of teaching achieve different outcomes.
When we think about training we typically think in terms of training classes, academic courses and the ubiquitous two day workshop. Despite the prom...
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Strucutural and Strategic Planning
In theory projects are initiated by the creation and formal approval of a Project Charter. The Charter details the projects objectives, outlines the scope of the project and establishes the authority for the Project Manager to proceed. In practice few of the organizations I visit use a formal Project Charter and instead a hotchpotch of different methods is used.
Theses informal methods of initiating a project often turn into a long drawn out activity. From the sea of ideas, options and p...
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The Incentives Infrastructure
One of the pillars of successful Project Management is the need for a project to have a clearly defined goal. Establishing a goal provides a basis for the project’s scope to be established, provides a way to measure success and provides a reference point for use when making project related decisions.
There’s no doubt that establishing clear, measurable objectives is an important step in setting a project on the road to success, but a clear goal is sometimes insufficient to ensure that everyon...
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Fear of Commitment
One of the fundamentals taught in Project Management class is the need to define what the success of the project will look like. Only by establishing a picture of the desired end state are we able to establish project scope properly and make effective decisions about how to manage the project. In Project Management class we’re taught to express project success as specific measures that define the project’s goals. These measures are often captured using SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Ach...
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An Essential Question
When directly asked, most Project Managers recognise that the level of success their project teams are likely to achieve is directly correlated to the team’s ability to make effective decisions. If the team can consistently make good decisions, the chances of success are high. If they make a bunch of bad decisions, the chances of success are greatly reduced. Despite the obvious correlation, the role of decision making in the project environment is generally poorly understood.
If we can agree ...
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The Requirements Excuse
Studies into the failure of IT projects almost always make reference to poor requirements as a leading source of failure. Requirements are of course a vital part of any project. Without knowing what you’re building how can you build something of value? Although I agree that getting the requirements right is a central pillar of project success, I do have a problem in pinning project failure on poor requirements.
As those who have run IT projects know, establishing requirements can be a tricky ...
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Revisisting Deming
Most people who have been through basic management or quality management training will have been exposed to the work of Edwards Deming. Known particularly for his work in helping Japanese companies establish a quality culture, Deming is regarded as a founding father of the quality movement. Although Deming is best known for his use of process improvement as a tool for improving quality, Deming’s thinking covered a considerably broader view of the organization.
One of Deming’s greatest contrib...
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The Process Fallacy
As many readers will know, the idea of “continual process improvement” is a pillar of the quality management movement. By improving processes, the root cause of problems that allow mistakes to be made can be eliminated, thereby allowing the organization to produce higher quality goods and services.
Although the idea of continual improvement started in the manufacturing sector, in the mid 1990’s the idea gained ground in the IT sector as well. Models such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)...
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Steering Clear of Shoddy
Although home renovation projects and IT projects may not appear to have much in common, there is one regard in which they are striking similar, both suffer from undesirably high failure rates. In Canada, TV personality and master contractor Mike Holmes draws attention to failed home renovations projects in his show “Holmes on Homes”. Each week Mike visits a home owner who has been the victim of a shoddy contractor and exposes the poor workmanship they left behind.
The problems in the home re...
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