Learning from Past Projects

After a project is completed, how do organizations go about determining what went right and what needs improving?  One close out activity that can be conducted is a project “post mortem” to determine lessons learned (Greer, 2010).

My first experience in the development of courseware occurred when I got hired on as a subject matter expert for a US Navy training project.  We had 18 months to develop seventeen task related training lessons.  Overall, the project ran pretty smooth.  Some things that attributed the project’s success were the project manager’s organization, communication among team members, and the quality assurance process.  According to Portny, Kramer, Mantel, Meredith, & Shafer (2007), effective communication is key to successful project management.  The PM kept the team informed of any information concerning the project and we kept the PM updated with the progress of the lessons being developed.  Along with that, the team members shared information and ideas with each other to resolve any development issues that came up.

The project manager’s organizational skills were helpful and he did not micromanage the team.  He delegated tasks and expected us to execute them.  If needed, he would do a follow up to ensure there were no problems in completing a tasks.  Once the first couple of lessons made it through the quality assurance/review process, they could be used as models for the follow-on lessons.  It was a slow start to get to that point, but once we got there the development moved pretty quickly and there were very few errors found during the review process.

I did experience one problem with this project.  As the ‘new guy’ and lead SME of the team, there were two other developers that had a hard time with making corrections or changes to their lessons based off my recommendations.  Don’t get me wrong, if it was a technical error, they fixed it; no problem. But if I recommended any kind of editing to the text or fixing something within a graphic, they would argue and tell me it wasn’t my place to make those recommendations.  I never put up too much of a fight over these instances because I knew during the review process the instructional designer or project manager would catch the same error and have them change it.  It was just frustrating to me that they would not make some simple corrections and save others some time and energy.

From this project, I learned that having a good project manager that is organized and communicates well can help in project success.  I also learned that you have to work with different types of people; some which may cause you frustration.  When faced with those situations, just remember that you are working toward the same goal of trying to produce an exceptional product.

Reference

Greer, M. (2010). The Project Management Minimalist: Just Enough PM to Rock Your Projects!. Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc. Retrieved September, 15, 2011.Retrieved from https://class.waldenu.edu/bbcswebdav/institution/USW1/201740_02/MS_INDT/EDUC_6145/artifacts/pm-minimalist-ver-3-laureate.pdf

Portny, S. E., Kramer, B. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., & Shafer, S. M. (2007). Project management. Chichester, United Kingdom: John Wiley & Sons.