PM#11
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Corporate project teams thrive when they learn from one another’s experiences. If one team does something that works—or that fails spectacularly—others should hear about it and profit from that knowledge. In fact, the capture and transfer of lessons learned can be a differentiator between success and failure in a competitive project-based environment. That proves true across a range of functions and industries, from scientific research and development to large-scale manufacturing and consult- ing services.
In 2017, member- based nonprofit APQC (apqc.org) studied six organizations to learn how they manage the knowledge that comes out of large, complex projects. The first two arti- cles in this series discussed reasons to embed knowledge transfer in your project management strategy and the role of virtual communities in facilitat- ing cross-project collabora- tion and learning. This final article focuses on the role of lessons learned in project KM as well as the value organizations can derive from getting relevant lessons into the hands of others who may benefit.
Reflection and analysis helps project teams learn from successes and failures
A majority of the organizations APQC studied in its research ask project teams to identify lessons learned at key decision
points throughout their projects. Those collaborative sessions allow project participants to discuss:
◆ what went well (especially any new tools or methods that produced positive results),
◆ what went wrong (especially issues that the team could have mitigated or avoided), and
◆ what changes the organization should make or what the team
might do differently in the future.
The meetings give proj- ect teams an opportunity to address internal dif- ferences of opinion about decisions and outcomes while build- ing consensus on the best approaches mov- ing forward. Lessons learned conversations also help project man- agers examine risks associated with their
projects and document how the team is man-
aging and minimizing those risks.
Among the organiza- tions in APQC’s research,
Volvo Group Trucks (volvo group.com) has one of the most
thorough approaches to capture project lessons learned (see Figure 1). The fol-
lowing describes the lessons-learned process that Volvo project teams undergo at every stage gate of their projects.
By Lauren Trees
Project teams and KM—Part 3
The benefits of identifying and sharing lessons learned
across projects
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1. In a workshop setting, identify all project pain points and compile a list.
2. Before the workshop can close, identify the root cause of each project issue.
3. Evaluate whether each issue has potential implications for other project teams.
4. For internal project issues, establish a corrective plan within the project team.
5. For external issues, identify possible improvements and log the lessons, root causes, improvements and potential recipients in the lessons learned log for committee review.
Volvo has created detailed process documentation, complete with tools and templates, to guide project manag- ers through lessons-learned workshops and help them identify and prioritize relevant issues. In addition, a commit- tee of senior project managers coaches teams as needed to fully refine their KM submissions. The committee also partners with Volvo’s project man- agement office to provide e-learning tools for project teams to leverage on demand.
The key step in each lessons-learned workshop is ensuring that the project team identifies a root cause for each issue, explained Amer Catic, Volvo KM specialist and implementation leader. “You cannot just say that the
purchasing process for a certain type of gearbox doesn’t work,” he said. “You have to say why it doesn’t work. Other- wise we cannot do anything about it.”
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight C e n t e r ( n a s a . g o v / g o d d a r d ) , l e s - sons-learned workshops focus on specific project events. The KM office facilitates after-action review sessions called “pause and learn” at key decision points or after project incidents (e.g., failures or near misses) that require reflection or risk management. The sessions are designed to allow project teams to transfer lessons informally within a rich context of dis- cussion. During each 90-minute session, 10 to 20 project participants work with a facilitator to examine a recent project event and come to agreement on what worked, what didn’t, what to change for next time and what can be learned from the experience.
After each pause-and-learn session, the NASA Goddard KM office drafts a concept map based on the proceed- ings, which the project manager, dep- uty project manager and team members validate and sign off on. Figure 2 shows a basic concept map template. Accord- ing to NASA Goddard’s KM represen- tatives, the concept maps enhance the pause-and-learn process by enabling teams to clarify and visualize the rela- tionships between various observations and resulting recommendations. In addition, the process of validating and
finalizing the maps helps clear up any misunderstandings from the session and moves the group toward consensus on key issues.
At global IT and communications equipment and services company Fujitsu (fujitsu.com), project teams capture les- sons learned through a collaborative pro- cess driven by the organization’s robust project management community. During dedicated sessions called Jump Start, the project manager gathers with client repre- sentatives and other Fujitsu project man- agers who have delivered similar projects, worked with that same client or are well- versed in the client’s industry.
Together, that group of stakeholders discusses project execution and outcomes. Adapted from an approach used by Exx- onMobil (exxonmobil.com), Jump Start sessions are designed to evaluate projects in an informal, nonjudgmental environ- ment and surface new ideas, tools and a wide range of issues. The sessions may occur at the end of smaller projects or at specific milestones within larger projects.
Curation allows organizations to pinpoint lessons that require broader action
Once project knowledge has been surfaced and documented, the next step is to filter it so that key insights and lessons rise to the top. A great deal of the knowledge that a project team cap- tures will be relevant only to the team
Volvo Group Trucks’ Lessons Learned Process
Figure 1 Source: APQC
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itself—or perhaps to a handful of sister teams performing similar work. How- ever, a subset will need to be circulated to a broader audience or institutional- ized in processes, procedures, tools or other official guidance.
The organizations APQC studied use a variety of approaches to separate out knowledge that is broadly applica- ble across the organization, distribute it to the appropriate stakeholders and get those stakeholders to act on it to improve project outcomes. Some emphasize top- down strategies in which leadership com- mittees evaluate knowledge and lessons for distribution and incorporation into official guidance, whereas others have adopted more organic methods that rely on the wisdom of crowds to help pick out key knowledge “nuggets” that other project managers should take note of.
Volvo Group Trucks has a struc- tured process to ensure that knowledge generated by project teams is trans- ferred to the right people and used to improve all projects (see Figure 3). As described earlier, Volvo teams con- duct workshops at each project stage gate to uncover challenges and lessons. The teams themselves perform the first step in the knowledge filtering pro- cess: For each issue raised, the group evaluates whether the issue has poten- tial implications for other projects. If the issue is internal to the project, the
team is responsible for correcting it, and no one else needs to be informed or involved. However, if the issue has broader impact, then a more extensive follow-up process is triggered.
For external issues (i.e., ones that affect other projects or parts of the organization), the Volvo project team is expected to log the issue, root causes, the proposed solution identified during the workshop and the suggested recip- ients (i.e., individuals who would need to implement the solution) in a lessons-learned log. A committee of senior project managers meets every two weeks to review the log, refine and validate the submitted lessons. Once confirmed by the committee, lessons are published to a central repository where other project teams can access them.
Once validated, each Volvo lesson is assigned to a designated recipient. That individual, usually a process owner or high-level manager, is responsible for resolving the issue or minimizing the risk identified in the lesson and reporting back to the committee on the solution that was implemented. In addi- tion, as part of its validation process, the committee identifies certain lesson resolutions as organizational best prac- tices, which are tagged accordingly in the repository.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Cen- ter has similarly defined processes for
separating out project knowledge that needs to be addressed at a higher level. Throughout planning and execution, project teams capture all the details of their projects and outcomes in various reporting systems. However, only a small subset of the information in those systems is transferred into the center’s lessons-learned system and database, called Goddard Knowledge Exchange, which includes lessons from internal projects and other center sources.
Goddard project teams evaluate numerous data sources—including problems documented in monthly sta- tus reporting, problems identified via risk management processes and pause- and-learn sessions—to identify items with implications for other projects that should be submitted to Goddard Knowledge Exchange. A Knowledge Exchange working group, consisting of the chief knowledge officer and repre- sentatives from each directorate, evalu- ates project lessons for inclusion in the lessons-learned database and decides what knowledge is both applicable and important enough to be shared at that level.
Universally applicable lessons can be built into training for project leaders
The review and curation activities described above are highly effective for extracting project knowledge that should be shared with other teams and used to update project-related advice and standards. And for many organiza- tions, that is the natural limit of project KM efforts. However, two of the orga- nizations APQC studied take things a step further by isolating a handful of insights and lessons that are applicable not only to a particular process or type of project, but also to project manage- ment scenarios across the enterprise.
What type of knowledge is so uni- versally germane and worthy of shar- ing? For those organizations, the focus is on skills and techniques for leader- ship, critical thinking, decision making, documentation and risk management. Deciding that face-to-face training is the best way to impart those skills, both organizations have analyzed project successes and failures enter- prisewide, selected a handful of situ- ations that exemplify the themes they want to reinforce and built interactive training sessions to familiarize project
Template for NASA Concept Map Based on a Pause-and-Learn Session
Figure 2 Source: APQC PROJECT TEAMS continues on page 28
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managers with those cases and the underlying lessons.
The best example of this comes from global defense, aerospace and security company BAE Systems (baesystems. com), which uses a case-based learning program to disseminate high-level les- sons learned applicable across projects and sectors. Rather than focusing on specific technical or project knowledge, the program is designed to impart skills related to making sound decisions in complex, shifting environments. That emphasis was selected based on needs assessments and an analysis of the root causes behind the organization’s project successes and failures.
Before instituting case-based learn- ing, most lessons learned were kept within sector-level silos or were “les- sons noted but not actually applied,” said Mike Kessler, BAE Systems’ chief learning officer. “We had a lot of information overload and information management problems around lessons learned. We had to find the richest les- sons and get them into a context where people could actually use them.”
To address that problem, BAE Sys- tems’ corporate learning organization developed a series of detailed, MBA- style case studies based on notable past projects. Led by the chief learn- ing officer, the learning group worked with business leaders to select the best cases to develop based on the strategic
decisions or dilemmas faced by proj- ect teams. The cases are intentionally designed to cover a range of business sectors, wins and losses, captures and executions, national versus interna- tional projects, product versus service focus and key decision points.
During a typical case-based learning session, participants work through one case in the morning and a second, very different case in the afternoon. For exam- ple, if the morning case focuses on a “win,” the afternoon case might describe a “loss.” The instructional approach for each case is unique based on the desired learning outcomes, but every case is pre- sented in three phases. For example, a session might include an initial review of materials to identify the assumptions and risks associated with a potential project, a deeper analysis of whether the project is worth pursuing, final analysis and practice transferring relevant knowledge to a project execution team. Each session ends with a review of key lessons and their applicability to participants’ current projects.
“We keep it interesting, fast paced and a little or very stressful,” Kessler said. “You don’t get all of the informa- tion you need; you don’t get all of the time that you need to put everything together. You have to make a lot of quick judgments and think on your feet in rapid timeframes.”
The case-based learning approach allows BAE Systems to address common themes across programs and sectors,
such as risk assessment, customer inti- macy and competitor intelligence. The training approach also gives participants a broader view of the organization’s pro- grams and decisions.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Cen- ter uses a strikingly similar process to extract crucial, universally relevant les- sons and embed them in project man- ager training. From the organization’s pause-and-learn sessions and the les- sons-learned database, the KM office develops case studies to share with all project teams. The project management office and the KM office sponsor work- shop forums to share those case studies and real-time lessons from current proj- ects. The format is one full day twice a year with case study presentations and panel discussions.
According to Ed Rogers, Goddard’s chief knowledge officer, the workshop forums bring the lessons alive for par- ticipants and help them understand what really went on in each project, how decisions were made and what outcomes resulted. “If this was import- ant enough to cause a setback or cost overrun, then the stakeholders (usually at NASA headquarters) want to know: Did you learn? Did you understand why that happened?” he said. “It’s the same question they would ask about an engi- neering anomaly. Do you understand the root cause so we can be confident you won’t make that mistake again?”
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Action Path for Addressing Lessons at Volvo Group Trucks
Figure 3 Source: APQC
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to learn about taxonomy and returned this year to describe the advances his organiza- tion had made. ASCO developed a taxon- omy to categorize hundreds of thousands of pieces of content into six major catego- ries for the purpose of improving search and automating curation of content for various websites and services.
Another application based on the taxon- omy was designed for attendees at ASCO’s annual meeting. The taxonomy was used to create a session recommender that matched conference attendees’ interests with session content, based on a brief questionnaire and attendee profiles. The recommender pro- vided attendees with personalized recom- mendations from more than 200 sessions offered during the 5-day meeting. Users of the application responded positively and provided feedback that will improve usability in future versions.
In Enterprise Search and Discovery, more than a dozen sessions focused on
such topics as making search effective and scalable, cloud search and applying cognitive computing to search. Grant Ingersoll, co-founder and CTO of Lucid- works (lucidworks.com), and Marc Ber- man, head of search for Onix (onixnet. com), teamed up to discuss the evolution of bots and AI. One piece of advice from Ingersoll was that if your organization can’t make search work, it will not be able to get to more advanced levels. “The key point is to learn the user’s intent,” Ingersoll advised. “Find out what they care about and scale the answers to meet the user’s needs.” Berman provided a set of guidelines for building the business case for search, including defining the current state and major gaps, and then building a prototype that has a mea- surable impact to help develop support within the organization.
The SharePoint Symposium ses- sions addressed ways to collaborate in Office 365, how to create a knowledge management strategy using the Office
365 platform, and how to comply with federally mandated records manage- ment requirements, among many other topics. In the popular Stump the Gurus session, attendees asked about user interfaces, accessibility and important pitfalls to avoid in records manage- ment (the worst one being to do nothing about it).
As with the conference program, vendors covered a wide range of per- spectives. Search software vendors were well represented, as were those offering SharePoint-compatible solutions. Oth- ers represented such areas as customer engagement, governance and process automation. Vendors commented on the increasing sophistication of individuals who are investigating their products and services as the technologies used in knowledge management have become more familiar. ❚
Judith Lamont, Ph.D., is a research analyst with
Zentek Corp., e-mail jlamont@sprintmail.com.
The workshops allow participants to hash out project decisions and outcomes and learn from their own and others’ experiences.
Next steps Although the techniques used to cap-
ture and transfer project knowledge vary
widely, APQC recommends including a lessons-learned process in your tool- kit of approaches. Document repos- itories and communities can prompt useful exchanges, but some insights only emerge when project teams gather together to analyze their collective experiences.
However, be warned: Many organi- zations put lessons-learned repositories in
place and then fail to distribute and reuse the knowledge collected there. As you design your approach, make sure that you consider the potential audiences for the documented knowledge and how the orga- nization will take action to ensure it truly “learns” the lessons that are captured. ❚
Lauren Trees is principle research lead at APQC
(apqc.org), email ltrees@apqc.org.
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1. We’re still drowning in data and starved for knowledge. You know the signs. Tremendous need (billions of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid), exabytes of data and mil- lions of potential solutions. That pres- ents a limitless supply of dots needing to be connected, developed, tested and implemented.
In the area of health alone, the data ocean is vast. PubMed (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pubmed) comprises more than 27 million citations and links to the world’s massive corpus of biomedical literature. Better yet, the National Library of Medicine’s Center for Biotechnology Information (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) provides free access to a treasure trove of research data, analysis tools, programming interfaces (APIs) and open source code libraries, giving any- one (especially small startups) a jumpstart
on prototyping and testing innovative, low-cost solutions.
2. Tacit knowledge transfer is still very much alive. As we’ve seen, oppor- tunities for experiential knowledge abound. Take a break from the traditional vacation and participate in the growing “global knowledge café.” Interact with indigenous people who’ve had to mas- ter tacit knowledge transfer to survive. Connect with them at an emotional level. Then return home with an entirely differ- ent perspective and some radically new ideas as well!
3. Think globally, act locally. The common thread in all of this is localiza- tion. People living in grass-roofed huts in remote villages are closer to the problem, its context and possible solutions than the world’s best-equipped laboratories. That’s where KM comes in: combining knowledge generated in the field with the scaling capacity of the developed world.
It’s mind-boggling to think of how many solutions are lying undiscovered. Or being applied in one narrow area while overlooking a wide range of additional geographies and applications. How many people are still living without bare neces- sities simply because they don’t know about a low-cost solution that might have been implemented only a few hundred kilometers away?
The demand for knowledge of how to make increasingly scarce natural resources available to a world approach- ing 8 billion minds is growing. The good news is, as more minds rise out of mal- nutrition and poverty, more innovative breakthroughs will begin to flow, creating a virtuous cycle. ❚
Ar t Murray (amurray@aksciences.com), D.Sc.,
is CEO of Applied Knowledge Sciences
and co-founder of the Enterprise of the Future
(enterpriseofthefuture.org) initiative.
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