Post Mortem Review -- The Negative and Positive

Setting the stage:

Location/exact job description will remain nameless, my position was of one of the team members. We did have a main campus and a second location that influenced some of the issues being described below.

Scope of the project was to provide a snapshot in time of their current training for a specific group of employees--all falling under the same job series.  We were given access to the current career path structure, their learning management system (LMS) and told to go forth and prosper. As we began sifting through the material, we realized there was much more we needed and started the ball rolling to obtain the material. Eventually we produced the desired product.

Review of the project using Greer (2010) Project Post Mortem review questions

From www.pdu4pm.com/

• Let’s start with frustration or warning signs--communication or lack of direction between leadership and team members impacted information gathered, documentation of collected information, and the final report, all requiring unnecessary extra work.  Utilizing all available methods of communication would have minimized this issue. Weekly or bi-weekly meetings, whether in-person or on the chat/video software that connected each user on the closed server, program very similar to Skype or Google Hangout.

• Second negative issue was the personnel selected to join the team. There seemed to be a trend of veering away from hiring instructional designers that actually possessed experience with the Analysis portion of ADDIE. In hindsight, and if I was on the selection board, I would have asked for examples of their work illustrating their knowledge or provided an opportunity to illustrate during the interview.

• Ouch, here comes number three negative. Was there timely feedback, and the answer was no. Often dragged out, lacked clear direction, filtered through various interpretations; and how to fix it I believe is to communicate via written channels--document. Each team created their own operating procedures, and was not until late in the project was one central operating procedure developed and eventually followed.

• So let us move to the positive side of this project. Would worked well was the use of workshops that brought in subject matter experts (SMEs) under one roof, working together to develop a list of job task, subtask, and steps; as well as identifying knowledge, skill and abilities (KSAs). Out team worked so well to enable the SMEs to brilliantly develop a list of tasks that fit their career paths.

What did I bring

So what did I bring to the table to help the project eventually succeed, remember earlier, there were issues.  I took ownership of every piece of the project assigned to me.  I brought my background to help analyze the data. I gently encouraged my teammates to complete their portion of the project, stay focused, to communicate and not be a stove pipe of information. If I found a more efficient method of gathering data, that stayed within the established guidelines, I shared it.  If information was already gathered from a previous project I ensured other teams were not duplicating the effort, no need for redoing an activity. I led by example, even if others, but not all, would not follow

Project Manager Roles

Now that I have ranted about a project, lets look at how the roles in the project manager and how they could improve it if we started all over again.

Let me say we had two project managers, one on the client side and the other on the contract side--where I was. Both worked hard, but we still struggled to get it right after the third project. I would consider a pause button should have been pushed to keep control of the project to examine how things were done, select the best practices to collect and document the data (Portny et al., 2008). When an anomaly appeared in the next project, push that pause button again, agree upon the necessary changes and then press on.

As I indicated earlier, communication was a major player, influencing individual perceptions of management. The lack of communication caused individuals to do their own thing, this would stop had a operating procedure been established after the first project on the contract, and been communicated to the team as a team allowing all to share. Portny et al., (2008) pointed out the importance of open, two-way communication when there are separated office (on-site/off -site) locations.

As one who is about to enter a new position, it would be a shame to repeat what has happen.  It is up to me to take the lessons I learned from this set of projects and knowledge obtained from others, and do better.  

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References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.