Learning from a Project “ Post-mortem”

For a previous employer, I participate in the implementation of three new systems for the Accounting Department.  My direct supervisor was the project lead for our company and I was the first point of contact for the entire finance tower, which included approximately 200 people from an outside organization.  When the project started, my job as an Administrative Assistant did not include project support, but I eventually become more of a project coordinator with the vast majority of my work supporting the project team and not my employer. 

The project team was charged with implementing a new accounting system, a new time-reporting system, and a new expense-reporting system.  I was not very involved with the new accounting system, but I participated heavily with the other two systems from the beginning, including demo selection for each. While I did not actively participate in the work that was being done by the project team, they relied on my extensively for support in other ways.  Once the project work was near completion, I was recruited to be a trainer for my company’s employees for the expense and time reporting systems, as I had extensive familiarity with these system’s operations and the language that was permitted for the systems to operate effectively.

Even though I was not a member of the project team, I had excellent rapport with them and I was able to include some key processes that allowed employees to better understand the new systems.  The team had neglected to include any comparisons between the old systems and the new systems so that employees could relate the necessary steps needed to perform the operations correctly.  I was able to update the training material and training sessions with screen shots and additional information making the new systems relevant for employees to better comprehend.

My supervisor did, however, limit the amount of updating I could include in the training materials and unfortunately for employees of my company, a better learning experience could have been possible with more expansion of the material.  I understand that she may have felt that since we were paying this company to produce the material, interference on our behalf was not necessary; however, since it was for the benefit of our employees, we could have avoided unnecessary questions later on by including more.  The majority of questions posed could have been prevented if we would have involved ourselves more with the training material because “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Achong, T.).

The Project Manager for the project team was incredibly stressed and overall he did a good job with what he had to work with.  The biggest contribution he could have made to improve upon the process would have been to ensure we had at least one member of our company assisting the project team throughout the process of developing material. This one simple step could have assured that all of the information presented was conveyed accordingly.  Another improvement he could have made would have been to have the project trainers use the company’s computers to double-check the material and guarantee that the step-by-step instructions were applicable on our equipment.  Instead he relied solely on his project team of trainers to develop the material and therefore it was a huge disaster when the material was rolled out.

References

Anchong, T. (2011). Practitioner voices: overcoming “scope creep””. (Video Program). Laureate Education, Inc.