PMP Free Course- Tailoring and Lessons Learned
During this article we will see processes, practices,
techniques, procedures, and rules for project management. However, that is not
mean that is all practices written in this document should be applied in all
projects.
When you are managing a project, depending on
characteristics of a project you should select a process, tools, techniques,
etc. required to manage a project.
For example, if you will not purchase any materials for your
project, you might not need procurement processes in your project or some other
processes in other knowledge areas might be not necessary for your project. So,
you should not include those processes in your project management approach.
Define as selecting appropriate tools, techniques,
procedures, etc. to manage a project.
Tailoring can be done with a project team, sponsor,
organization management and other related parties with project management in organization.
Tailoring is necessary because each project is unique. Not
every processes, tools, or techniques will be required for every project. You
must be aware of a tool, techniques, processes and should tailor your project
accordingly based on required tools and techniques processes.
- Lessons learned.
We have seen in previous articles that is lessons learned
documentation is very important organizational process assets of a company to
consider when initiating a project. But why is important, what it is include,
we will see it in this article.
- Lessons learned of a project includes:
- What was done right.
The best practices applied during a project recorded in a
document by this way future projects get inspired from these best practices and
have the benefit of these right implications.
- What was done wrong.
Wrong decisions or wrong procedures that causes project team
to deliver slower outputs, it all documented and what could do to not face
these problems all stored in lessons learned.
- What would be done better if the project could be re-done.
For example, if the project had problems to resources
availabilities or planning weakness these should documented with reasons.
- Lessons learned should cover:
- Technical aspects of the project.
This include the schedule performance, cost performance and
quality performance of a project.
For example, what was the planned budget and what is the
completion budget, what was the planned schedule and what is the completion
schedule. These kind of plans values and actual values must be included, and
variance should be given inside of all over performance of a project.
- Project management
plans.
Such as work breakdown structure (WBS) of a project, risk
plan, schedule plan, cost plan, procurement plan, etc. and all management plans
must be archived in the lessons learned documentation for future references.
- Management (communication, leadership).
Lessons learned documentations should also give
recommendation on management communication and leadership.
For example, if there were a communications mistake, these
should be mentioned and what could be done for better communications must be
mentioned in documents.
The below figure give the role of lessons learned and how it
was improved with a help of new projects in an organization.
Before starting a new project, organization process assets
library of an organization is searched to check whether is any useful lessons
learned hints that can help in the new project.
Then useful hints are used during the new project and new
lessons learned are gathered throughout the project lifecycles. These new
lessons learned are used in other current projects of the organization.
At the end of the project, lessons learned documentations is
finalized and placed already on organizational process assets library of an
organization in order to use in future projects.