Collect anecdotes as issues occur to find patterns
Sometimes a project team can identify some causes of big delays or delays that were particularly annoying. But it is not always clear whether a given cause is the source of delays. The more common answer is, “We have no idea of the cause of delays / early delivery.”
Generally, this is because projects are complex and delays throughout the project interact and create a mess of spaghetti from which no clear answer emerges. So, what is to be done? To find out the real reasons behind delays, it’s better to discover them as they happen. This suggests that it should be part of the ongoing project management activities at the task level, rather than at the project level. Over time, the project and the whole collection of projects should collect reasons for task delays over the entire project network as it executes.
- Jack Vinson
NOTES
This narrative approach avoids the usual biases that happen after the fact, such as
- retrospective coherence or hindsight bias (things seem more linear, predictable, structured and less complex in hindsight…biased filtering of the past…we remember significant things to us but not other relevant stuff…we weave facts into a story that way the brain can remember a pattern rather than the raw information which is costly to store, this is at the expense of the raw truths…if we record closer to the time it happened there is more chance of raw truth being recorded)
- fundamental attribution error (we feel better when we can point at a cause…blaming someone, something, a decision rather than the complexity of the situational aspects…instead collecting raw issues as they happen gives us a data pool to find patterns)
Yes learning before by having peer reviews/sourcing people and documentation.
Yes learning after by having anecdote circles and after action reviews.
But learning during needs attention.
- Record raw anecdotes as they happen (low chance of losing context and content as memory and impact is fresh)
- People can learn from the lesson during the project and apply this while the project is still going, this way the lesson is applicable to the current project, not just future one’s…we can also detect weak signals and perhaps intervene before things get worse
- People can leave a comment on the blog post which induces conversation…many perspectives and experiences surface…people become engaged…also triggers patterns for recall
- People will read daily/weekly lessons in small digests rather than a long report
- It’s easy to blog as it happens, it’s a recount of an experience not a detailed report with an agenda…so we are more prone to actually share lessons and issues as it’s easier to do …absolutely everyone can be involved not just a handful asked to contribute
Related
Our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them
(Source: blog.jackvinson.com)
