I've talked to PMs recently who are almost literally crying for feedback from their project teams in order to improve and still get nothing. In organizations with project post-mortem procedures, not reviewing the lessons learned and estimates vs. actual data to come up with recommendations and revised practices for future projects is a terrible waste.
Perhaps because many project teams are eager to be done and move on to the next project, the process is hard to manage. When it is being done, it may be that many organizations feel good about having done the close work and then forget that review, analysis and follow-up is required to get value out of the closing process. Depending on the organization's culture, the issue may be a resistance to change inclusive of any data that indicates a need to do things differently.
I digested this and then looked at my department's own processes for closing a project (which I mostly designed...). I realized we are pretty much guilty of not systematically looking for process improvements out of our documented lessons-learned. So here's what I am going to do about it:
1) Add a section to our SharePoint portal where all lessons-learned will be posted for department access. This way they are not buried in the close documents, but rather are on a searchable project management site.
2) Propose a quarterly review and write-up of trends and findings from this information and hopefully publish it to the department, better still all PMs in the company (informally).
3) See if we can facilitate this partly through a quarterly project management retreat where we can concentrate on this stuff and really get into why certain things are happening and what the root causes are.
Focus on a different problem that one of my colleagues from another area shared with me: How to get project team members to offer honest feedback on project manager performance. This colleague is new to project management and hungry for feedback on ways to improve his own PM performance as well as the practices he and his department use to execute projects. His frustration comes when team members offer little or no feedback for improvement when he knows from the project's performance that there are many opportunities.
His post-project completion lessons-learned sessions are not yielding the feedback he needs and wants, so he's trying to figure out other ways to get this. Possible obstacles:
1) Team members uncomfortable offering feedback in public settings - perhaps offer anonymous surveys.
2) Sense that the culture is too deeply ingrained for any changes to take place - seek executive sponsorship to drive real process improvements tied to cost savings and time-to-market speed.
3) Inertia... "we've always done it this way"... comfort. This is hardest to overcome. He'll have to get people to see the value and want to change their PM practices.
He's passionate enough to keep after this even in the face of slow progress. It's worth doing, because it will help us get new products to market faster.
