I was just talking about this today… the process and importance of review. Not that I’m trying to support yet another bureaucratic processes - hell no! That wouldn’t be useful… but.. well, isn’t reflection the pathway to advanced skills and mature project outcomes?
Scott Berkum, who I saw speak at the Web Directions South conference in Sept 07 asks what people would be interested in for the 17th chapter of his book Art of Project Management
Here is my answer:
I’ll have to put my vote in for “Learning from projects after they ship (or your iteration ends)”.
I’m really big on reflecting, learning and getting better at what we do as individuals and teams and am currently lobbying for this where I work. The drive for rapid development in large to small businesses within the interactive industry is leaving this valuable step short. (or for dead)
Where I work we make the time for individual reviews against our job descriptions and KPIs but somehow move on to new projects regularly without looking at what could work better, how we could improve our processes or skills and importantly whether users or stakeholders liked the output. Is the product being used/ meeting performance targets? Is it a good user experience?
Often a project is compromised along the way in some aspect. Sometimes this is ok and perhaps even leads to the “mother of all invention” but other times the root of the compromise is retained by the lack of review. Neglecting this step leaves many of the tough issues unexamined or glossed over, conveniently left behind until another occasion for the compromise resurfaces. Likewise - it would be great to look at what worked well so that we can try and replicate that.
Often I think some of this neglect is human nature. As much as I love a good problem, I love to see the back of a problem that got in the way of outcomes.
In my mind it is important to look at how a product/project is received, how it has performed, what the feedback is, how the process could be improved, what skills and training would be useful for the team, what people have found that they are really interested in that they hadn’t thought of before… just for starters! I think many people don’t know where to start with this sort of assessment - especially in teams, so that the useful stuff can come out and work its way into constructive implementations to the way we work.
A chapter and exercises that extract and separate subjective outcomes and hard evidence (such as metrics) would be really useful.
