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Lack of Awareness of the Importance of Productive Re ection
The fth and nal conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that
although most PMO leaders engage in re ective practices, they may not
be aware of the value of these practices when it comes to facilitating or-
ganizational learning from one project to the next. As discussed in Chap-
ter 5, most PMO leaders engage in re ective practices in order to bring
“runaway” projects back into alignment with management expectations.
It may be that re ective practices are utilized more as a short- term “ x”
than as a way to make a project team’s tacit knowledge explicit for the
bene t of future project teams.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PMO LEADERS
Several recommendations are provided for PMO leaders who are endeav-
oring to improve their organization’s ability to learn from past project
experiences. Overall, these recommendations are aimed at establishing
conditions in which organizational members can re ect productively on
past experiences by increasing the social capital of the PMO leader and
reducing the e ects of defensive routines.
Recommendation 1: Focus on Accumulating Social Capital Across Multiple
Communities by Establishing a Network of Strong Relationships Built on
Trust, Professional Development, and Mutual Understanding. As knowl-
edge brokers among multiple communities of practice, PMO leaders must
maintain enough distance from each community to be able to o er bal-
anced perspectives, yet they also need to attain a degree of legitimacy
among these communities in order to mobilize attention. This is true
even for those who report to the highest levels of management (C- level
direct reports), as formal authority does not always equate to perceived
legitimacy among constituents. Therefore, it is essential that PMO leaders
build a strong network across communities in order to enlist support and
negotiate practice connections e ectively. Given the likely pervasiveness
of defensive routines and their confounding e ects on re ection and learn-
ing, it is necessary to gain the trust of organizational members by empha-
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sizing professional development over more punitive approaches and by
understanding the needs of each community and its members rather than
imposing practices that demonstrate a lack of understanding of a com-
munity’s unique requirements.
Recommendation 2: Focus Equal Emphasis on Learning from Success ful
Projects as from Those That Appear to Have Failed or Run O Course. If
formal learning practices are continually focused on poorly performing
projects, the organization risks enculturating learning practices as a pu-
nitive endeavor, making engaging in this process a less- than- appealing
prospect for organizational members. Moreover, if learning practices are
primarily focused on troubled projects, then the improvements in organi-
zational routines that result may be distorted in the direction of eliminat-
ing risk and establishing tighter controls to prevent such problems from
recurring. This may shackle future project teams with burdensome pro-
cesses that limit their innovative potential. It is recommended that PMO
leaders actively engage successful project teams in formal learning prac-
tices by adopting the multi- level learning practices described in this book,
not only to make the learning process more e ective and engaging, but to
discover the reasons why projects succeed so that this knowledge can also
be embedded in future project routines.
Recommendation 3: Re ect over the Course of Projects Rather than Just at
the End. Performing lessons- learned sessions upon project completion is
often ine ective when learning and re ection have not been part of the
project from the beginning. Project teams may not have recorded their
learning as the project progressed, nor will they have learned to re ect col-
lectively in a structured format, and these limitations can severely hinder
their ability to do so once at the end and expect a productive result. For
projects that last for months or years, project members will clearly have
di culties bringing to the surface memories about the ways in which they
solved problems over the course of the project, making the learning gen-
erated in lessons- learned sessions highly selective and potentially less than
useful for future teams. It is recommended that PMO leaders adopt multi-
level learning practices that embed formal re ective processes throughout
the course of projects.
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Recommendation 4: Provide Useful Process Knowledge to Project Teams
by Asking “Why” Questions in Lessons- Learned Sessions and Embedding
Stories and Examples from Past Project Experiences into Standard Method-
ologies and Templates. Most of the lessons- learned practices described by
PMO leaders focused on “what worked and what didn’t” with respect to
past project activities. It is recommended that these re ective questions
be supplemented with questions as to why something worked or did not.
This may generate more useful knowledge not only for the project team
that is re ecting on the experiences, but for prospective project teams that
need to heed this advice on future projects. Asking why can evoke richer
contextual information about why the practice worked or did not so that
future project teams can make informed choices about their planned ap-
proaches. This richer contextual information may also be accompanied by
what was formerly tacit knowledge on the part of the originating project
team, making this knowledge more accessible to the organization.
Recommendation 5: Establish Conditions That Are More Conducive to
Productive Re ection in Lessons- Learned Sessions by Utilizing an Objective,
Substantively Neutral Facilitator. Lessons- learned sessions can be domi-
nated by defensive routines, which can distort the re ective process and
block learning at the project level. The “lessons” that result may therefore
not represent the true experiences of project teams, further undermin-
ing the organization’s ability to continuously improve. It is recommended
that PMO leaders provide a means for project teams to utilize a trained
facilitator from outside the project team who can help the team uncover
its tacit knowledge and provide conditions that foster equal participation
so that organizational members’ defensive routines do not dominate the
session. A skilled facilitator from outside the team can help the group
members avoid “blamestorming” and focus on the processes by which
they achieved their outcomes rather than focusing on the performance of
speci c individuals, thus creating an atmosphere that is less conducive to
defensiveness, blame, or individual heroics.
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