MGMT 620 Week 5 DB Forum 3 Example

Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread and Two Replies

MGMT 620 Project Evaluation & Assessment, Discussion Board Forum 3 (thread and two replies)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the school district's rollout and the classmates' posts are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Thomas's text, the peer-reviewed studies and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 620.

Thread

Our school district issued laptops to all 9,400 of its students in two phases: the four middle schools in one fall and the three high schools the next. Phase one went badly in three ways. Families enrolled in the device insurance program late because the enrollment form went home only in English, so more than 300 damaged laptops were repaired at full cost. Classrooms had too few charging carts, so teachers lost the first ten minutes of many periods. And the help desk, staffed by the same technicians who supported teachers, had no process for students, who lined up at the library before school. The district held its review of phase one in May, eight months after the rollout, with half of the original team reassigned. The review listed all three problems. In phase two, all three happened again: the insurance form went home in English only, the high schools ordered carts using the middle schools' ratio although high school classes are larger, and the help desk again opened only during staff hours. The phase two project manager, who joined after phase one, told me she had never seen the May review's notes, which sat in a shared folder she did not know existed.

Von Zedtwitz (2002), surveying research and development organizations, found that only about one in five projects received a post-project review, and based on interviews with managers he grouped the barriers to learning into four classes, including the lack of time and attention after a project ends and the limited personal interest and ability of those involved. Our review happened, but late, and its timing reflected exactly those barriers: once the laptops were out, everyone moved on to the next school year's work. Busby (1999), assessing post-project reviews in detail, found that they spread knowledge and correct misunderstandings, but that their diagnosis tended to be shallow and their remedies superficial. Our May review named the problems but proposed remedies such as "improve communication with families," which no one owned and no one could check.

Williams (2008), reviewing the literature on learning from projects and surveying project managers, concluded that the temporary nature of project organizations and the complexity of projects both inhibit learning, and that organizations must deliberately build the structures that let lessons move from one project to the next. On the practice side, Thomas (2015) treats lessons learned as an evaluation process with defined steps, from identifying lessons to disseminating and applying them, rather than a single meeting. For a multiphase project like ours, that means a brief review the week each phase closes, while the team is still together, with each lesson assigned an owner and a deadline before the next phase begins. Had the insurance form been translated by a named person by June, phase two's families would have enrolled on time.

Paul told the Corinthians that the events of Israel's wilderness years happened as examples and were written down for the instruction of later generations (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Corinthians 10:11). Scripture assumes that a recorded failure is useful only to someone who reads it before repeating it. Our district now schedules phase reviews in its project calendar, and every lesson leaves the meeting with a name beside it.

Classmates: has a lesson from one of your projects actually changed how the next project was run, and what made it stick?

Reply to Priscilla

Priscilla, your thread about your hospital's move to blame-free post-project reviews was encouraging. You described how staff began speaking openly once the rule was clear that reviews would examine processes, not people, and how the number of issues raised doubled.

Busby (1999) found that reviews are good at spreading knowledge but tend toward shallow diagnosis and overly specific explanations. A blame-free format helps with the first problem, because people share more, but it may not solve the second. A review can surface twice as many issues and still stop at the first explanation for each. One technique is to ask "why" several times for each major issue until the discussion reaches a cause the organization can change. Thomas (2015) also emphasizes that lessons must be applied, which means each one needs an owner.

James likens someone who listens to the word without acting on it to a man who studies his face in a mirror, walks away and at once forgets how he looked (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, James 1:22-24). Assigning each lesson to a person with a due date would also give the next review something to check, which turns the review from a conversation into a cycle. Do your reviews end with owners assigned to the lessons, and has anyone checked whether the issues raised in the first reviews have recurred?

Reply to Victor

Victor, your engineering firm's practice of holding a lessons-learned review three months after every project closes was a thoughtful design, and I appreciated your reasoning that the team needs distance to be objective.

Von Zedtwitz (2002) suggests a cost to waiting, though. His interviews found that time and attention drain away after a project ends and that people's interest in reviewing fades as new work arrives. Three months later, the details that make a lesson usable, who decided what and why, may already be fuzzy, and some team members will have left. Williams (2008) adds that the temporary nature of project teams is one of the main barriers to learning, which a delay deepens.

Thomas (2015) describes lessons learned as a process that can run throughout a project, not just at its end. A compromise might be a short review within two weeks of closeout, while memories are fresh, followed by your three-month review to assess outcomes. The first would capture what happened; the second would test whether it mattered. The two-week session could be short, an hour with a structured list of questions, so it would not compete with the team's next assignments. How many of your original team members typically attend the three-month review, and has attendance changed over time?

References

Busby, J. (1999). An assessment of post-project reviews. Project Management Journal, 30(3), 23-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/875697289903000304

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Thomas, W. H. (2015). The basics of project evaluation and lessons learned (2nd ed.). CRC Press.

von Zedtwitz, M. (2002). Organizational learning through post-project reviews in R&D. R&D Management, 32(3), 255-268. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9310.00258

Williams, T. (2008). How do organizations learn lessons from projects, and do they? IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 55(2), 248-266. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2007.912920