Too busy to conduct a project review? Too many other daily project pressures such as over-ambitious timeframes, changing project briefs and moving expectations to spend any energy reviewing what went wrong - or right - with your just completed project?
You could be setting yourself up for failure down the line, according to the 2017 AXELOS project and programme management benchmark study, The Value of Project Management Excellence and the Search for Competitive Advantage.
The survey of project managers and organisations from around the world found that consistently avoiding project reviews appeared to exacerbate particular issues that led, ultimately, to a failed project.
According to the survey, project managers were in no doubt about the most pressing challenges they faced in delivering successful projects - and the challenges they emphasised tended to be the product of poor practice, bad planning and management decisions.
Nearly half (48%) of respondents who rarely or never conducted project reviews had had a failed project in the previous 12 months. This number fell to about one third (34%) of project managers who claimed to have reviewed either "always" or "most of the time".
These results indicated that while carrying out reviews, which help project managers to understand what went well, what didn't and ensure that knowledge is carried on to future projects, does not guarantee success in all future projects, it showed that those who did were less likely to experience actual project failure.
The most serious issue leading to project failure, according to respondents, was having had the wrong people on the project. This was followed by an inability to deliver the project on time, having an ill-defined business justification and running over budget.
The study found that when analysing the way people tackled project issues, there were some issues that were minimised most effectively by project managers who conducted project reviews either always or most of the time.
Conducting reviews appeared to reduce the problem of encountering a poor business justification, with less than a third of those project managers having experienced it in the past year. The same people were also less likely to face the issue of missing a project deadline; exceeding the budget; or having the wrong people on the team.
The research also indicated that there was a direct link between the level of project management maturity and the success of projects.
Respondents were asked to describe the maturity of their organisation. Only 17% claimed to have established processes in place, with ongoing improvements based on monitoring and feedback. In addition, while around 25% said they combined processes with routine monitoring and evaluation, more than half admitted to struggling to implement any significant best practice of this type.
Among the more mature organisations, 67% had experienced no project failure in the past 12 months, while only 47% among the less mature organisations had managed to avoid project failure in the same period.
Project management methodologies, such as those developed by AXELOS which include ITIL, PRINCE2 and MSP, are aimed at embedding best practice approaches to successfully deliver projects. By not following these approaches, some project managers were making the same mistakes time and time again.
"Learning from Experience is a core principle of PRINCE2 and only by adopting the methodology can project managers start to build a culture of excellence," the report concluded.
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