Project Management Week 2

Learning from a Project “Post-mortem”

This week’s blog focuses on the importance of the Post-mortem analysis of a project. Recently I was involved in not only being the instructional designer, developer, and facilitator but the project manager for a training project. Let me share a description of the project with you.

A brief description of the project.

I was asked to build a training project for our regional administrators on what their new roles and responsibilities would be in supporting store managers in the use of the new learning management system (LMS). The training would also require that the regional administrators perform tasks within the LMS. I was given five weeks to analyze, design, develop, and facilitate training for 26 regional administrators spread across the U.S. using a virtual classroom, course training materials, and an LMS sandbox that was forever changing since it was being configured as training was built. If you’re a practicing instructional designer I’m sure you’re chuckling right about now and feeling my pain.

What contributed to the project’s success or failure?

Dr. Van Rekom stated this week that one of the challenges of a project is setting the scope of a project right at the beginning (Laureate, 2016). Without documenting what is in scope for a project or out of scope can cause scope creep. Scope creep can increase the time, budget, and scope to any project.

In the case of the administrator training project, I had documented that the scope would include training 26 regional administrators over 4 sessions that would be 2 hours in length. The success of the project would be measured through level 1, 2, and 3 evaluations. By the time it came to deliver the first session management had the training audience up to 76 participants. Many of these participants would never have access to perform the task within the new LMS and did not have access to the sandbox. This kept them from participating in any of the sandbox activities, which in turn caused confusion the first day and I was unable to get through all the training task for that particular session. From the level 1 evaluation, I was able to show management that by adding the additional participants the regional admins that were supposed to learn their new responsibility tasks within the LMS felt the class was too large for adequate learning to take place.

Also within scope was to train the regional admins on how to run out of the box reports from the LMS. To accomplish this training task the reporting function would need to be working properly 1 week before training started. As the project moved forward it was quite obvious that the reporting function was not going to be working properly before training began. This issue was brought to the stakeholder’s attention and it was decided that training for reporting would take place anyway. Once again from the level 1 evaluation we found that the regional admins found this part of the training as a challenge since they were unable to see what the reports would look like once ran.

Being able to measure for success and documenting the results really helped to share with the stakeholders the importance of not creating scope creep within our projects.

I also learned that no matter how well you state what is in scope you can only support it so far management will always have the final say. This is a heads up to any of you thinking about becoming an ID or PM.

Which parts of the PM process would have made the project more successful? Why?

During the beginning of any project, you are identifying your project team and assembling them before the kick-off meeting. This allows the project manager to document in the project plan each team member's role and responsibility. Part of the process during a kick-off meeting, as a project manager, is to obtain specific commitments from each team member. In the case of the regional admin training, I believe that not only did I document management's role and responsibility, I thought I had also obtained their commitment to support what was in and out of scope for the project. Apparently, this was not the case.

Conclusion

When performing your post-mortem review take the time to analyze each phase in your project plan. If there are many project team members send out a list of questions prior to the meeting to give those analytical thinkers time to form a response (Greer, 2010). This will allow them a chance to come to the meeting prepared to share what they thought worked well and what didn't during the project. Once you have all responses documented you will be able to see if the challenges during the project were because of team dynamics and/or technical process challenges. If there are more than three improvements that need to be made. I focus on the top three for the next project.

Reference

Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (n.d.). Practioner voices: Overcoming ‘scope creep’ [Video file]. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu

Greer, M., (2010). The Project Management Minimalist: Just Enough PM to Rock Your Projects! Laureate Education. Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/USW1/201740_02/MS_INDT/EDUC_6145/artifacts/pm-minimalist-ver-3-laureate.pdf