Project Management Book

...chapter 13 continued

These are pages two and three of the stage end report:

On this third page one might record things like this:

• Positive: The sponsor wandered around every couple of weeks asking how it was going and this helped to spur the team's efforts.
• Negative: The users were 100 miles away from the IT people. Next time we should move the IT team to the users' location during the requirements and UFD stages. If we had done this we would probably have finished UFD a month earlier: definitely worth the hotel bills!

And if the project tracked and recorded hours as we described in the planning chapter, attach that gold-dust data to the stage end report. We then have a neat record of what was learned and what could be done better next time, and also a record of where every man hour was actually spent.

This is potentially a very useful document to anyone about to start a similar project and it should be available to anyone who wants to see it. However, with the best will in the world, documents like this do sometimes get filed away on the intranet somewhere and forgotton. Which is why, in companies with a project support person or group, there might be another rule: you must send a copy of your stage end report to project support.

They could simply act as librarian, but maybe we should charge them with a rather more proactive duty: to read each and every stage end report and where a lesson has been learned by project manager A that is clearly relevant to the project that project manager B is about to start up, it is the job of project support to get A and B talking to each other - or at least send B a copy of the stage end report. And if project manager A's experience would be of interest to the wider population of project managers and team leaders, project support twist A's arm to make a presentation at the next project managers forum. Project support become agents forcing cross-fertilisation.

So, all of the above would be done at the end of each project stage: team post mortem (lessons learned meeting), produce a list of actions you will take to make the next stage/project even better, share experience, summarise lessons learned and costs in a stage end report and send it to project support.

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