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Does your or your organization’s success depend on the ability to deliver
successful projects? Are you interested in helping project teams, project
managers, and senior executives improve their ability to execute mission-
critical projects and programs? If you answered yes to both of these ques-
tions, then this book is for you. It provides a practical guide to facilitating
business transformation and performance improvement for project orga-
nizations that’s grounded in cutting- edge research in the elds of project
management and organizational learning. The goal is to equip you, the
reader, with the knowledge, skills, and tools that will enable you to engage
people and teams in a process of continuous learning, innovation, and per-
formance improvement. The goal is to ensure success in the implementa-
tion of new organizational strategies, the development of new products,
the rollout of new systems, and the management of mission- critical pro-
grams. Multi- level learning is an approach that focuses on helping orga-
nizations deliver rapid results, learn, and deliver again, providing value to
customers, eliminating waste, and delivering increasing levels of value as
projects and programs proceed through their life cycle.
By deploying the techniques and practices in this book, you will be
positioned to help your project organization:
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Reduce time to market for new products, systems, processes, and tech-
nologies.
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Improve customer and end- user satisfaction with project outcomes.
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Reduce the risk of failure, wasted investment, and runaway projects.
INTRODUCTION
2 Introduction
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Improve productivity, quality, and teamwork.
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Continuously improve delivery from one project, phase, or iteration to
the next.
Let’s face it, project environments require learning on the job. Every
new project requires project managers and teams to plan out their ap-
proach, even if it’s only slightly di erent from the one they used the last
time. Every new project and every phase of every project presents new
challenges and opportunities. There aren’t always established routines
for solving every problem or seizing every opportunity that surfaces on
a project. Moreover, organizational priorities can change and markets
can shift while projects are “in ight.” Thus, every stage of every project
or program provides new experiences that require managers and teams
to learn, adjust, and take action. As a result, project organizations need
mechanisms that enable them to continually adapt to ensure that they are
focused on the right projects at the right time, that their processes are agile
and e ective, and that project teams are continually innovating from one
phase to the next and from one project to the next.
There are companies that have found great value in combining the con-
cepts of lean operations with structured learning and re ection to deliver
faster results that enable them to transform and continuously improve.
They’ve built these practices into their ongoing project and program
management approach. Agile software development practices are break-
ing new ground on this front. These approaches engage team members
in structured retrospectives after each iteration (lasting from a few days
to a few weeks). The retrospective focuses on what’s working, what’s not
working, and what needs to improve for the next iteration. The U.S. Army
has been using a similar approach in its training of combat teams in the
deserts of California (Darling, Parry, and Moore, 2005). Units huddle after
simulated battles to re ect on the original intent, what actually happened,
and what can be improved for the next battle. The insights are then spread
around the world to ght new enemies, who are themselves adapting to
changing conditions. The computer chip maker Intel has adopted the use
of retrospectives to improve its product development practices around the
globe (Lavell and Martinelli, 2008a). Retrospectives have been so success-
ful there that the company now has more than 65 people who are trained
Introduction 3
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to conduct these sessions on a regular basis, leading to improvements not
just on a single program, but on others that can use the innovations to
improve quality and reduce development time.
Clearly, re ection is not just for philosophers, poets, and academics.
It has been built into the way work gets done to improve performance in
some of the best learning organizations in the world.
Yet while many organizations have adopted high- performing learning
practices, structured re ection most often occurs in a postproject review
or “lessons- learned” session at the end of a project—if it happens at all.
Intel and many other companies have found that this practice isn’t work-
ing. By the time the session takes place, it is often too late to allow teams
to improve, and the team members may not remember everything that
happened over the course of a multimonth or multiyear program. The re-
sult is that structured learning and improvement are deferred until it’s too
late—or avoided altogether. Because of this, learning remains informal
and incidental in most project organizations, and, as we shall see later, this
type of learning creates undesirable surprises, blowups, and embarrass-
ments for senior managers and teams alike.
Organizations simply cannot a ord to leave learning to chance on their
mission- critical investments. That’s because without mechanisms for sys-
tematic learning, problems continue to remain under the surface, perhaps
without being addressed at all, until they snowball into larger issues that
trigger a “red light” on the project status reporting system ( Julian, 2008).
Monumental failures can occur, leaving a wake of damaged reputations,
blame, and losses of both time and money for the organization.
Leaving learning to chance not only can lead to outright failures, but
has huge opportunity costs. Improvements that could shorten project
delivery time, improve productivity, reduce cost, or improve quality can
go unexploited and forgotten. As a result, the organization winds up
spending countless more time, dollars, and personnel on future projects.
In the extreme, each project team reinvents the wheel every time it starts
a new project. It is even more likely that this will happen in environ-
ments with poor cross- project communication and stressed- out project
managers and teams.
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