Question: Please help me summarize the following recommendations in a few paragraphs Recommendations We would recommend the following watchwords for review chairpersons: Encourage deep diagnosis. Use
Please help me summarize the following recommendations in a few paragraphs
Recommendations
We would recommend the following "watchwords" for review chairpersons:
- Encourage deep diagnosis. Use cause-effect diagrams if they are likely to help.
- Encourage attention to history. Ask whether similar things have occurred historically.
- Encourage the examination of the bigger system beyond the immediate confines of the project.
- Discourage glib categorization. There is little that cannot be put down to "communications problems" in complex projects, but categorizing something this way is only a starting point to the diagnosis, not a finishing point. It is easy to put down as a communications problem, for example, two people making different assumptions about who has responsibility for a particular action. A proper diagnosis would examine how different assumptions arise and why they persist even when they lead to errors.
- Plan remedies properly by examining side-effects and thinking through the implementation. If this has to be the subject of a second meeting, then so be it. Chairpeople need to have the maturity to realize that suggested but unplanned remedies will simply deepen review participants' cynicism.
- Invite key outsiders to postproject reviews to assist in dissemination. In one of the reviews we studied, managers of new projects were invited, and this was probably far more effective at dissemination than written summaries would have been. Written summaries tend to be written from one person's standpoint, so one often does not know how contentious certain issues were. And these summaries often lack the detail that adopting a new practice depends on.
Most people would probably count such practices as common sense. It is therefore important to be aware that such practices often failed to materializeeven among the highly intelligent, knowledgeable, and thoughtful people who ran the reviews we studied.
Summary
Overall, in the light of this study, we would come out strongly in favor of postproject reviews (provided you do not call them "post mortems"). We could spot flaws in the ones we saw, but they were still valuable. And most of the organizations we worked with had not run them before, so judging them by the first-of-kind would not be reasonable. This study, while limited, points the direction for additional research in this important area of project management.
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