EDUC 6145 - Project "Post-Mortem" Analysis

The project that comes to mind when thinking about the Project “Post-Mortem” discussion that we find in Greer (2010) is the development of a course that was run in our cybersecurity Master’s program here where I work.

To give a little bit of context and background, the course was entitled “Applied Cryptography” and was the second course developed for our Mater’s program. The course was 7 weeks in length, entirely asynchronous and was planned and later developed by two different people and you can probably already see what problems arose in the course of the development. Additionally, we had a total of 16 weeks to completely develop the course from planning to launch in our LMS. The course ran and we received our student satisfaction surveys as well as feedback from the instructor from which we did our “post-mortem.”

General Questions (found in Greer, 2008, pp. 42-43):

1. Were we proud of the deliverables? In short, yes. Although there were significant challenges, all members of the team felt that the course was the best it could have been given what we had to work with.
2. What was the most frustrating thing? There were 2 actually. First, the person originally involved in the conceive and design phases (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton and Kramer, 2008) left the institution before the project moved to the start and perform phase (Portny, et al., 2008). This led to the fact that we had to find another subject matter expert for development which led to the second frustration, which was that he had very different ideas of what the project deliverables should be.
3. How would I do things differently? Obviously, trying to use the same subject matter expert through the entire development process would alleviate this frustration.
4. What was the most gratifying part of the project? For me it was seeing the course completed and quality checked and then launched live.
5. Which methods or processes worked out well? In hindsight, I believe that the process that worked best was the creation of the project plan, or the conceive and define phase in the course text.
6. Which processes were frustrating? For me personally it was the “perform phase,” (Portny, et al., 2008). This was where we had the most challenge with the new developer. It was difficult to compare performance with the plan because he was constantly desiring to alter the plan or discard it entirely in some cases.
7. If I could wave a wand, what would I change? Keep the same developer through the entire project.
8. Did stakeholders participate effectively? If not, how could we improve their participation? The major stakeholders in the project were the dean of the college and the director of the online development department (my boss). Unfortunately, the two of them didn’t see eye to eye on how the project should be developed and this caused friction between members of the development team about timelines and benchmarks. In terms of how to get them to work more effectively, I believe that allowing the dean to participate more actively in the day to day project work (at least from a high level) would give him better vision into why deadlines are set as they are and why benchmarks need to be met.

Given all of the above, what contributed to the overall success or failure of the project? The persistence of the members involved on the project team is what finally put the project into the successful category. There were many problems that arose that easily could have made the project a failure and it was only through the hard work and dedication of the team that the project succeeded. Though all members had some disagreement throughout the process, the knowledge that the course had to launch on time is what eventually brought the project to fruition. It just goes to prove that often projects, despite extensive conception and definition phases, can often go completely off the rails and it is up to the project manager (in this case, me) to try and pull success from failure.

In thinking about which parts of the PM process would have made the project more successful, again I would say that the project planning and creating specifications for deliverables phases are the most important. In this case, the project would have run smoother and had less challenge if we had gone back and done new project planning and creating specifications for deliverables sessions when the new developer took over. This would have made the project more in line with what he had envisioned and would likely not have been as resistant as he was when working with the original plan. As the major stakeholder in the project (all of the content for the course was of his design) that should have been clear, however, we were directed to stick with the original plan. Ironically, for the next time the course runs, we will be completely scrapping this course we build and starting a new project using the plan of the new developer.

References

Greer, M. (2010). The project management minimalist: Just enough PM to rock your projects! (Laureate custom ed.). Baltimore: Laureate Education, Inc.

Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.