• You finished the project within time. That’s great!
• Well, it was really a team effort. Thanks to the detailed master plan we could achieve success delivering the project as expected.
• How did you manage to predict the exact duration of each task so well in advance?
• Actually the estimated times for each activity have differed from the original project plan quite a bit and some tasks had to be re-planned.
• Did the planned tasks take longer as planned or shorter?
• Some took longer, some shorter, majority took longer.
• So you needed to make overtime to still finish as planned?
• No, thanks to the team we could manage without overtime.
• So you needed to improve the productivity or the working procedure to catch-up the lost time?
• No, actually we followed the original procedure.
• What did you do to compensate the lost time due to the unexpected problem?
• Some other tasks that took less than previously planned could compensate the problem, additionally we had included some safety buffer time before final acceptance to cope with any unforseen problems.
• What have you actually improved to cope with the lost time?
• Well, we finished on time isn’t that good enough?
• It’s not.

The dialogue above exemplifies that even a successful project can have failed when it comes to learning and continuous improving. Even though the project has been finished on time, within the planned budget and in the right quality, there are many wastes not been tackled and nothing has been learned. Maybe the time estimated in the project plan had a lot of buffer, maybe the budget has been over dimensioned, maybe there was good luck and everything runned according to plan. The success or failure of a project alone is not a good measurement for a good or bad project management. And that’s not all, project management alone is not a good tool to foster the learning and continuous improvement.

Why is project management not the best tool for learning?

The problem with it is following: when a project is layed out, with all activities and deadlines, the project manager is requested to know all the needed steps for the completion of the project in advance. We all know that life is not that simple, and for a complex project there is no way all the aspects can be known in advance. Of course a good planning is important, but there must be clarity that much of adjusting and adapting will be necessary during the project execution. A good project manager is therefore not only the one that keeps the deadlines, but much more the one which reacts fast and efficient to the good and bad “surprises” contained in each project. By simple using up the slack time from previous tasks, is not a good response to any problem. Good ideas, creativity are key ingredients which should be used every time problems are found. In this way the whole organization can experiment and learn to constantly develop further the project execution capabilities.