5.3 Project Execution and Closure Part 3

00:00

So here's exit some examples of what are called dashboards and these air really key. Usually you lies at a p M o r E p M o level to manage that shirt. Right? So this is a dashboard kind of showing a particular portfolio, the different projects that are underneath the portfolio.

00:17

What's my risk? Are they on schedule? Or they had a schedule or they behind schedule. What's level is the project in?

00:25

And this really helped You managed to turn because you can see

00:29

basically, the items and red are the ones that you want to address, right? So the

00:34

all that green that on those various pie charts and the green that's in the S P I and C P I.

00:39

That means things are going well. I don't want to spend a lot of my effort looking at things that are going well. What I need to be spending my effort and on is looking at things that are not going well. The red sections of the pie chart the yellow sections. Well, what needs my intervention? What, uh,

00:57

resistance to change? What roadblocks that are in the way of success? Can I help alleviate

01:04

And this is another version of that, and this is MME. Or like requirements based, right? So this is a similar type of dashboard that just shows I've got these requirements. Thes defects have been reported in my system,

01:17

and it helps manage that term. So you see, I've got requirements that air closed out. That's good. I got requirements that are open. That's not bad. But, I mean, it could be late where they do

01:27

and stuff like that. So this is just another dashboard and dashboards, a really key for enterprise projects. You gotta have a way of getting through that churn and seeing what the areas are that you need to be engaged in to help alleviate roadblocks and keep the project moving towards success.

01:46

So once the project is complete or should be complete again, closure is it is a somewhat of a gray area, but you have to have a close date. You have to have your requirements, you have to have your deliverables, and you need to stick to it.

01:59

That way, you can actually close the project out and move it into the maintenance phase, and everything after that become the enhancement and that's a whole separate ball of wax.

02:07

But when you close that project, you really want to make sure that you do a good job documenting the lessons learned. So what is the lesson learned? Also sometimes known as an after action review? That's a sort of a military term, but it's starting to spill over into the civilian world

02:23

and what it is. It's not a blame game. It's not a hey Cane forgot Thio.

02:27

Build this piece of code and he's a terrible programmer and we should. You know, the project was late because of him kind of thing. But what it talks about is

02:35

really the lesson learned. How can we do better next time? Right. Organizations are undertaking enterprise projects Maur and Maur regularly. It's becoming Maura Maura requirement to survive and are fast changing world. So hey, we overscheduled RS Emmys. That's very common.

02:53

It's one of really the top reasons why projects fail.

02:55

So if we noticed it on the last project, we need to document it so that the next time a project comes up, we can apply that lessons learned and actually hopefully do a better job of not over scheduling rs Emmys on the next project.

03:09

How you document that and then share it right. If you just put it on a word document and put it on some network folders somewhere and nobody ever reads it, then do you any good? So you want to make sure that you have a methodology for these enterprise projects and really, for all projects

03:23

to have a repositories of some kind. So the army uses something called call C A l l.

03:31

That stands for the center,

03:34

the center for army lessons learned. And it is a

03:37

pretty public facing website, definitely public. If you're in the military and you have the right kind of military log in and it's ah, it's a repositories where everybody puts their lessons learned. Hey, I went on this mission. I did this project. This happened. This is the lesson I took away from it.

03:52

And it provides a really easy searchable area where you can look up and say, Hey, has anybody done this type of mission before? Oh, yeah. Here's 100 people that have done the same kind of mission.

04:02

What were their lessons learned? Let's see it. So if you can create something like that within your own organisation, that'll be that would be great,

04:10

a depository, something that has some sort of functionality to it that allows for searching. And you don't want to be the person with all the answers as all this knowledge and not be sharing it, because what that means is, ah, lot of your organization is struggling with things that you've already had mastered

04:28

and not being given any kind of aid.

04:30

In addition to documenting and doing the lessons learned and all that kind of stuff, you want to also be developing sort of your best practices that PM process chart that you saw an earlier video that you were hopefully downloaded. That's a result of a series

04:45

of

04:46

project

04:47

origination through closure lessons learned and realizing that that the organization that I built that for did not have a standardized method to bring in the ideas,

05:00

put some data around them, do some discovery around them, make some quantitative and qualitative decisions about which projects we're gonna be the best investment for the agency and actually get those projects into execution. So we developed sort of a best practice that said, we need to do it in this manner.

05:16

We'll talk more about this a little bit later. But the idea of a learning organization is part and parcel to spending that quality time and project closure to gather that information in the data about lessons learned.

05:31

The organization that you're a part of that I'm a part of anyone's part of will not survive

05:38

without inculcating and putting continuous improvement and learning into their very DNA, and we'll talk more about this later. But basically part of this closure process is developing that learning organization and actually gathering that data, gathering the analytics

05:58

and then applying it to future projects.

06:01

So in summary, you know, we went kind of through the entire project life cycle, from ideation through closure, and hopefully you have a pretty good idea of the standard. Nothing that really standard in project management but the standard ish, the standard light, the most likely course of events that are going to occur

06:20

during a project.

06:23

And then we talked about this specific project, execution enclosure challenges and what some of those best practices are.