Lessons Learned and Wash Up's

Project delivered what happens next

When a project has completed there is still things to do, both for the ongoing development for the business that you are delivering for and for your own personal development.

All good project management books will tell you about the formal project framework requirements of closing a project although you will find it difficult to get engagement once a project has been completed, as the natural order is to look back rather than forward. However I firmly believe that to keep innovating you need to learn from things that don't go smoothly and to plan.

This week I have completed two different wash up activities, whilst both looking back at project delivery they serve different purposes one to help with strategic direction for a next phase of integration and the other to identify how a process improvement can be implemented better.

Executive Summary

A 2 page summary highlighting the following:

What the issues were

Solutions for the next stage

Working at this level, no need to go into detail, remember the sponsor should be aware of these issues and this is a recap. If you have kept a good RAID log through the project this activity is relatively easy to put together.

Detailed wash up

This activity brings together all the stakeholders who have been involved in the project and runs through the following themes:

Communication of project strategy and deliverable

Testing Procedure and feedback

Process Improvements

Actions to complete before fully BAU

From the wash up this week, there was an obvious problem identified as it was clear that the senior management who had signed off the change had not clearly communicated to the users what was happening and why, a vital lesson learned for my next project.