More Lessons Learned for Projects & Programmes
Whether it’s in the public or private sector, we often hear that failed projects and programmes in the context of being over budget or late. The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in London has taken a closer look at some of the key areas of fault in failed government projects and programmes.
In its 3rd ‘Lesson’s Learned’ report, the OGC highlights four lessons to be learned.
Lesson 1
Poorly designed policy and/or bad initial programme set-up are root causes of programme failure.
Lesson 2
Project teams which explicitly set out to learn from past mistakes are more likely to achieve success in major new initiatives.
Lesson 3
Collaborative working is hard, but it is essential to achieve outcomes in complex programmes which involve multiple delivery partners. The PPM community has an important role in strengthening collaborative working with those leading on policy development and strategy in their departments, in order to achieve the desired benefits from high-risk delivery programmes.
Lesson 4
Assurance is beneficial from the early stages of the policy-to-delivery lifecycle. The PPM community has a key role in encouraging the take-up of internal and external assurance.
You can download the 3rd OGC Lessons Learned paper here.
Interesting lessons. Ignoring the softer people issues, I would add the attacking the risks every day is one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt during my time as a program manager.
In fact, you could almost argue that each of the four lessons you point out could be picked up and addressed as part of the program’s risk management process if they were initially overlooked or ignored. In effect, that the four lessons above are a subset of the lesson of good risk management.
Denis
Yes, Rob, I agree that budget and schedule are very important aspects of accomplishing a programme. However, some programme managers are so facinated with that, and tend to forget about achieving quality. We should therefore be mindful that some programmes are more quality driven than cost and schedule. It is meaningless to accomplish a programme with cost and budget, if the programme does not meet with the quality specifications.