This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #47 – Figuring out lessons to learn.

Here’s this week’s situation:

We just finished a 6 month project: or more precisely, the project finished us. We had many of the major things that can go wrong, go wrong: big schedule slips, low quality code, and upset customers. We did finally deliver work to the customer but no one was very happy about it. Since we use agile we’ll be continuing to do iterations on the same codebase after a short break.

At last Friday’s status meeting we talked for 20 minutes about what we can learn from last time. Nobody spoke up. Our well intentioned, but somewhat confused, group manager talked the whole time and made vague suggestions without commitments. I don’t expect to hear anything about it again. I’m afraid that the next project is going to be much like the previous one.

Does anyone ever take time to learn from the past? Who should lead the process? How long does should it take? Has anyone experienced a good post-project review?

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