Effective Project Management: Learning From Past Projects, An Essay.

This assessment item requires you to reflect on your participation in the course, identify lessons learnt, and consider what actions can be taken to address lessons and improve future study projects.

Importance of Learning in Project Management

Learning takes place in each project. Lessons learned are acquired from the process involved when undertaking the project. Therefore, learning happens from our project experiences and the skills from others. Project leaders, project team members and management all take part in the lessons learning periods by reviewing learnt lesson report and then make decision on how to utilise the acquired knowledge and skills. Accordingly, sharing lessons learned amongst project team members help to avoid the project from repeating similar mistakes and enable members to take advantage of the useful practices. Therefore, novel methods and excellent practices are shared among members (Hornstein, 2015). Certainly, the lessons learned during the course of the project shall be used to improve forthcoming projects as well as future phases of the present projects. Learning does not have to wait till when the project is accomplished to start learning. Learning should be identified at any stage of the project. Accordingly, learning lessons time is carried out at different periods according to the criticality and project complexity. The most crucial times are towards the end of the project and at the end of every phase when learning in real-time. Waiting until the end of the project becomes challenging to learn each lesson since one can end up missing major lessons. On the same note, towards the end of the project time is always elapsing therefore, project members are likely to rush and in the process forget key things learned. Similarly, some of the project members allotted to the project in the earlier stages may no longer be part of the project towards later stages (Kernaghan, & Da Silva, 2014). As a result, the most suitable period to start discussing modules learned should be at the beginning of the project.

The core objective of initiating and planning phases in projects is to outline the work that has to be performed to deliver the project product by establishing a strong basis of the project 

prior to allocating resources to the project. The most significant that all stakeholders clearly understand the intention of the project, the reasons for undertaking the project as well as how the results shall be realised. On the same note, initiation and planning help to outline different stakeholder responsibilities to ensure that they genuinely commit themselves to delivering of the project. It is during this stage that all significant project components are reviewed so as to enable all project participants to have a good introductory knowledge.          

Initiating and Planning Phases in Projects

How I planned to gather and document lessons learnt

Getting started: Lessons learned are at first introduced into the project at the time of initiation process as the reference point, then past information which was earlier collected is used as input to planning (Hornstein, 2015). Such information is implemented during planning phase. Therefore, to be able to determine information that is significant I followed the following steps for the new project being scheduled.  

Identifying similar projects: The lessons learned from the earlier projects can only be important if the projects are similar.

Collecting significant information: When similar projects have been identified the planning team should gather useful information from these projects. Some of the things that are considered include identifying data for appropriate tasks, data for projecting the work effort.

The most integral parts to make sure there improvement initiative process becomes successful include project risk analysis, identification and response planning. The risk plan has to be in line with the project management plan. The development of a risk register is developed to watch over and track risks throughout the project lifecycle (John, Keeler, Wiek, & Lang, 2015). Therefore, the project team especially stakeholders and control account managers are supposed to be engaged in the risk planning process. The project is required to conduct an initial qualitative risk analysis by focusing on intensifying the risk likelihood and results of optimistic activities and reducing the chances of adverse events to the project goals. The risk planning process involves the following:    

The creation of significant metrics is carried out to quantity action application process and then provide the project team, stakeholders and the administration management with useful feedback to determine the appropriateness the project progress.  

Developing a method to maintain traceability of the implemented activities by relating the project to the recommendations, findings, and observations determined during joint cause study.   

The validation and verification process has to be agreed by the stakeholders and recorded during the implementation stage.  

Conclusion

All through the lifecycle of the project, I learned lessons and find out chances for enhancement.  Documentation is a major aspect of project management used to document lessons which aids members of a project team to determine their strongholds and weaknesses. Therefore, I was able to understand the importance of different project planning stages and their significance towards the project’s success.

References

Andrews, T. D. (2012). Managing improvement initiatives as projects. Paper presented at pmi® global congress 2012-North America, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Newtown square, pa: project management institute.

Hornstein, H. A. (2015). The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), 291-298.

John, B., Keeler, L. W., Wiek, A., & Lang, D. J. (2015). How much sustainability substance is in urban visions?–An analysis of visioning projects in urban planning. Cities, 48, 86-98.

Kernaghan, S., & da Silva, J. (2014). Initiating and sustaining action: Experiences building resilience to climate change in Asian cities. Urban Climate, 7, 47-63.