By Bonnie Biafore

Why should you chronicle project history? One important reason is to avoid doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results each time. If your organization wants to improve its performance for projects in the future, it must learn from the projects in its past.

Learning not to repeat past mistakes is an important part of improving project performance. Mistakes can result in wasted money, delays, poor project quality, unmet objectives, and the tarnished reputation of your project team. For example, if the caterer for a conference of vegetarian chefs serves turkey with giblet stuffing, you're not likely to get another chance to organize that group's events. If your team had made such a gaffe, it would be important that it not be forgotten years down the road, when your clients and project team members have changed.

Identifying and repeating past successes is just as important as learning from your mistakes. From these accomplishments, your team can develop best practices, which are case studies of how to do something efficiently. When there is already a history of success, best practices help team members perfect or improve on what works, as opposed to reinventing processes from scratch.

Project teams can use historical information to improve project performance by doing the following:

• Reuse effective techniques   If you used a document template in the past, you already know that reuse can save time and spare mistakes. Identifying and documenting successful strategies, techniques, shortcuts, and checklists can also help future project teams build on a history of positive results.
• Employ templates for similar projects   Although every project is unique, many projects share tasks, resources, cost profiles, and potential risks. If your projects share historical similarities, well-designed documents created for past projects can be reused as time-saving templates. By having reliable data as a foundation, a template for a common project management form or a budget spreadsheet with estimated values based on past projects can help kick-start your next project.
• Develop better estimates based on past experience   Many project teams face tough schedules, budgets, and goals, but teams on even the smallest of projects struggle with the unceasing optimism of those who estimate the project resources that will be required. There is no better support for the rationale of your project resource plan than data about the resource use of similar past projects.
• Educate project managers and team members   Project management grows more popular every year, so organizations continually require more project managers and more project-savvy workers. The history of past projects is a great resource for teaching people how to manage projects and work in a project environment.
• Learn from past mistakes   There's usually nothing wrong with making mistakes as long as you learn from them. Sweeping mistakes under the rug is a mistake — you've already paid tuition in the form of the costs incurred by those mistakes, but you haven't learned anything from them! Acknowledging mistakes, analyzing their causes, and identifying ways to prevent them in the future is a far more beneficial approach.

What project information should you record?

Unfortunately, if you have trouble getting enough time to plan a project before it starts, chances are good that you won't have much time to study a project after it's completed. Fortunately, if you track key performance measures during the life of a project, you automatically collect much of the historical information you need by the time the project is completed.

The measures that you communicate during project status reports are the same measures that you should save as historical information. For completed projects, the final values of those measures are usually sufficient. However, if a project went considerably off track, project measures taken at interim points during the project life cycle can help identify where things went wrong.

Consider recording the following quantitative measures as project history:

• Costs   Include the estimated cost at completion, the actual cost at completion, and the variance between the two.
• Schedule   Include the estimated dates for completion and for major milestones, the actual dates, and the variance between them.
• Work hours   If your project management system and accounting system track hours spent, you can identify resource issues from records of the original estimates of hours and from records of the actual hours spent. For example, a schedule overrun might be explained if the project plan depended on experienced workers but the project was staffed with junior-level employees.
• Scope   Document any changes to the scope of the project, including scope that was cut to meet the bar on any other quantitative measure and scope that was added.
• Quality   Include the original quality objectives for the project as well as the quality measures obtained.

Consider recording the following qualitative feedback as project history, because it's as important as the quantitative measures:

• Variances   If variances are significant, the project manager and other members of the project team should attempt to identify reasons for variances and make recommendations for preventing them on future projects.
• Risks   Document risks that occurred during the project, and highlight any risks that weren't identified in the risk management plan. In addition, include in the project history the risk response that you chose and whether it was successful.
• Organization and resources   Teams struggle with project organizational structure, regardless of whether the company uses functional departments, a matrix organization, or a project-based resource pool. Each type of structure has its pros and cons. Include in the project history any issues that arose with the project organizational structure and how you resolved those issues. In addition, projects sometimes run into trouble with specific resources. For example, some individuals aren't well-suited for highly collaborative work. Consider documenting issues with team members and recommendations for whether they are appropriate candidates for future projects, if this is appropriate with respect to your company's policies.

How do you capture feedback and lessons learned?

Preparing recommendations for improving current practices is an important step to increasing success on future projects. However, even the best of intentions can get lost in the heat of starting the next project. You can make great strides in project performance by taking time after every project to turn successful techniques into guidelines or templates for the future.

Postmortems are also fertile ground for collecting suggestions for the future. Because team members tend to forget about what worked and what didn't over time, if you hold project reviews after each major milestone, you can capture crucial feedback while it's fresh in people's minds. To get value out of postmortems and project review sessions, consider using the following techniques:

• Provide a method for anonymous feedback   Some people avoid saying anything negative in public. At the beginning of the project, provide a method for submitting anonymous feedback throughout the project. A few days before the postmortem or milestone review session, remind team members that they can submit issues and suggestions. You can rework the suggestions that you receive into less-threatening topics for face-to-face sessions.
• Prepare an agenda   A few days before a meeting, distribute an agenda. Provide ground rules, such as "keep it constructive" or "one speaker at a time."
• Assign a scribe   Appoint someone who is familiar with the project to take notes during the session.
• Document risks   The project manager should document risks that occurred during the project and highlight any risks that weren't identified in the risk management plan. Documentation should include the risk response chosen and whether it was successful.
• Use open-ended questions   Sometimes, feedback sessions take some work to get started. To foster discussion, be prepared with open-ended questions about the project. For example:
• What worked well? Many organizations start by pointing out the problems and then assigning blame. However, if you start a project review by identifying what worked well, this puts everyone in a more positive and productive frame of mind. These positive observations are also valuable records for increasing the likelihood of success of future projects.
• What didn't work? Document anything mentioned as not working well. Sometimes processes are flawed. In other cases, company culture may make a particular approach inappropriate.
• What could have been done better?
• What should have been done differently?
• What would you recommend we do for future projects?
• What did you learn?
• Discuss issues   Discuss issues that arose during the project, identify actions that successfully resolved them, and make recommendations for preventing those issues from arising in the future.

Why not get started?

To review, you now know:

• Why project history is an important resource for ongoing improvement of project performance.
• What type of project data is most beneficial to record and analyze.
• How to involve your team in recording feedback and in creating action plans for project performance improvement.

About the author   Bonnie Biafore is a PMI (Project Management Institute)-certified Project Management Professional (PMP). She is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and award-winning author of several books about investing, personal finance, and project management, including On Time! On Track! On Target! Managing Your Projects Successfully with Microsoft® Project (Microsoft Press, 2006).