Paper Example on Understanding Lessons Learned in Project Management: Impact on Future Outcomes

Abstract

The project management process is a compelling and essential process undertaken in each project towards successful completion. This paper reviews several papers done before and within 2020 about the role played by lessons learned from past project management processes. An assessment and analysis of these papers are crucial in acquiring a comprehensive understanding. The analysis of the documents will determine the impact of these lessons on future projects. An examination of ongoing projects allows for the comparison of the results with the objectives of the entire project. This assessment helps in determining whether the lessons applied in the current project are producing the expected results. Preparedness is a very crucial portion of the entire project management process. The aim of this proposal is, therefore, to develop a competent model encompassing the lessons learned from past projects accompanied by their effect on current projects and anticipated impact on future projects.

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The model will serve as a reference guide to the organization for any project, whether ongoing or in plans. This model boosts preparedness and saves time spent on making mistakes similar to those made in past projects. The models also help in reducing the costs and risks involved with running the project management process from scratch. This project will solve many organizations the challenges experienced during the project management. With the understanding of lessons learned in the previous projects, the organizations will be in a position to handle any difficulties that they face during the project management process. This project incorporates several research methods, including the creation and distribution of questionnaires to different respondents. These respondents are project managers and other project stakeholders in past several organizational projects with experience between 5-10 years within distinct organisations, working in the project management docket. The researcher employed questionnaires in the collection of information. Moreover, the use of secondary sources like analysis of existing literature is substantially relied on to provide the information contained herein.

Chapter One

Introduction

Prior research is fundamental in the project development cycle. To meet the project requirements, the researcher has to go through a process of information acquisition and proper data collection. Understanding of failures and successes of previously developed projects highly assists in developing new projects. The incorporation of the lessons learned supports the foundation laid in the development of any current works. Old plans offer an avenue to the research, and the challenges faced, as well as the outcomes of the project to the new projects. The timeline and the period through which the previous projects were conducted assists in determining the timeframe and the likeness of relationships between the old and current projects. It is, therefore, evident that all lessons learned in the past 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 to achieve success in the current plans. The proposal focuses on analyzing existing literature about the use of existing lessons on previous projects to develop new ones successfully. The project will place a high priority on learning mechanisms used to pass the lessons learned from past projects, exploration of the innovative methods of facilitating project learning, as well as the concepts in future projects that ensure their efficiency and successes.

1.1.Background of 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. According to Argote and Miron-Spektor (2011), Organisations 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 (Di Maddaloni and Davis, 2017). 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 the plans.

1.2. Research Focus

This study will involve both the primary and secondary methods of data collection. The researcher will explore and analyze the existing literature about the objectives of the study. The researcher will also collect primary data through interviews conducted on ten project managers, with an experience ranging from five to ten years as project managers. The relevance of obtaining information from such experienced managers is that they have experience in oversight of the project and have immense knowledge in taking ownership of all deliverables. Also, they regulate human resources and scale them towards unprecedented outcomes such as health pandemics, political instability, and natural calamities. Thus, the researcher has the opportunity of collecting accurate and practical information from the managers. The researcher will also make use of questionnaires drafted and distributed to project managers and other previous project stakeholders. The researcher will then analyze all the data collected from both methodologies and collectively make conclusions.

1.3.Why Does This Topic Need Researching?

Researchers like (Pemsel 2013; Fuller et al., 2011; and Ewin et al., 2017) have emphasized the significance of capturing lessons learned; however, they discovered that these lessons are ineffectively used. Over the years, such researchers as Pemsel, 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 have undergone documentation 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 difference in the archived data. According to Curtis et al. (2015), 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 (Curtis et al., 2015). The researcher, therefore, decides to do more personal primary source data collection, which takes up most of the time. The primary source data is meaningless until a proper analysis takes place to extract thematic patterns and make sense out of them.

This topic requires researching to expose the methodologies used by other researchers to learn and utilize information in their projects. The research will also increase the chances of learning about innovative methods of facilitating learning as well as the nature of the existing learning mechanisms that would help in fostering the success of future projects.

1.3.1. Why Is This Research Significant?

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 can spend lesser resources in developing a new project from scratch. Learning occurs deliberately, and thus the organisations should be prepared to take advantage provided by the learning opportunities available in the projects (Bell, 2010).