Essay Example on Table of Contents: Enhancing Effective Project Outcomes

Introduction

The development of projects is critically dependent on proper knowledge and enough research. Understanding of failures and successes of previously developed projects highly assists in developing current projects. The incorporation of the lessons learned supports the foundation laid in the development of any current project. Previously developed projects offer an avenue to the research, the challenges faced as well as the outcomes of the project to the current projects. The timeline and the period through which the previous projects were conducted assists in determining the timelines and the likeliness of relationships between the old and current projects. It is, therefore, evident that all lessons learn in previous projects are useful in the process of developing current projects. In most cases, looking at the lessons learned from these previous projects helps the project managers and project stakeholders to learn and position themselves in the right way possible in order to achieve success in the current projects. This proposal focuses on analyzing existing literature about the use of existing lessons on previous projects to develop new ones successfully.

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This project comprises of two main parts. These parts will generally involve the literature review and the study design and methodology. The literature review will encompass selected research on the subject under study. Several research papers will be considered, which will give the background information on the lessons learned from existing projects. The information will be used in this project to enable the researcher to conclude the use of these lessons learned from previous projects and their impact on current projects. The second part of this research will involve the study design. This section will highlight the data collection methods used in gathering the required data, the methodology design, as well as the data analysis method used to analyze the data. The conclusion and the researcher’s recommendations will then complete the paper after that. The combination of all the data collected is analyzed to create meaning and show the importance of the lessons. The lessons learned from past projects and their usefulness in the successful outcomes of future projects is essential.

Part A: Literature Review

Background of the study

Both the organization and the project managers cannot keep on repeating similar mistakes. Even though the idea of lessons learned has advanced into a formal and coordinated management practice, as a concept, the custom of capturing and archiving knowledge is not new. Organizations have had access to the archived data in many databases for an extended period. Most of the project managers and project stakeholders ignore the information because they loathe the critical research required to find the correct data. Utilizing this practice entails doing two vital activities that are, capturing significant lessons learned and making valuable use of this information. One of the best ways to know the impact of these lessons is to eventually assess current projects and analyze the use of the learned lessons in these projects. Numerous researches have emphasized the significance of capturing lessons learned; however, they discovered that these lessons were not used effectively (Pemsel, 2013). Over the years, most researchers have documented their work, offering other researchers a fair chance to access and utilize their thoughts and their conceptual and experimental data. It is, however, saddening to notice that even with many archives of data in existence, the researchers have been relying on primary first-hand data to do the same researches that are already documented and archived in significant databases.

One of the main reasons as to why the usefulness of this information has been uncommon is that there is a continuous change in the industry, prompting a change in the archived data. Most writers do not revisit their work after publishing, which makes it hard to renew. With the work depicting a previous industrial model and set-up then, one can only compare it with today but not utilize the information fully since it represents a different era. Additionally, most projects have deadlines which delay the researchers from using the archived work. For instance, the user finds 20 articles on the subject of the impact of lessons learned in the previous projects on future projects, and then the researcher realizes that they cannot go through the whole articles. They, therefore, only read the abstracts, which generally only summarize the work, and that leaves the researcher, not in a good position about the required information. The researcher, therefore, decides to do more personal primary source data collection, which takes up most of the time. This primary source data is meaningless, and it, therefore, requires analysis in order to extract thematic patterns and make sense out of them.

Previous projects give a comprehensive overview of failures, successes, expectations, and limitations that one may expect before starting a project. Project managers concur that it is fundamental to learn from previous projects (Pollard, 2019). With the right method of archiving the preliminary project data, especially the analyzed data, the organization I able to spend lesser resources in developing a new project from scratch. Learning is conducted deliberately, and thus the organizations should be prepared to take advantage provided by the learning opportunities available in the projects. As long as the organization can access the lessons, and they have a sustainable mechanism to keep a continuous flow of those lessons for future projects, it is then easier for any organization to develop a project. The ease is because access to the project lessons is always available to the project managers and other stakeholders. Besides, remarkable infrastructure should be incorporated by the organization to enhance the maximization of projects to project learning (Poston, 2019). Therefore, the sole purpose of lesson learning is to define activities necessary for the successful application and capture of the learned lessons. With the right infrastructure to promote the continuation of the existing projects, the organization gets to save cost and time.

Research Question

To what extent are the lessons learned from the previous projects enhancing the efficiency of the organizational plans associated with the organizations’ future projects?

Aim

The main aim of this project is to explore the extent to which most organizations advocate for the extensive learning of past projects in preparation for future projects. The research also aims to assess existing literature systematically and thematically and analyze the theoretical and practical review in order to ascertain the importance of the lessons learned from past projects. The aim of assessing these lessons is to discover innovative methods for facilitating project learning and incorporating the lessons in the present and future projects to ensure their success. Most organizations have ad access to archived data on the lessons of previous projects and their prospective impact on future projects, but they have not been using the information effectively. Finding an effective, sustainable learning mechanism to enable organizations to utilize the available information effectively and pass it onto future projects is one of this project’s goals.

Research Objectives

The learning processes of the previous projects deem to constitute valuable input to future projects substantially. A practical and sustainable learning mechanism is a requirement for any organization to develop. With such a learning mechanism, the passing of information from one generation to the next will be more comfortable, prompting a more straightforward project management process. In the current study, various research objectives were taken into consideration to aid a splendid display of the level of merit associated with the learning processes of projects.