Are successful projects easily repeatable – Maybe not!
I was reading Donna Fitzgerald’s blog on Gartner today and ran across a posting that made me think of the repeatability of successful projects.
http://blogs.gartner.com/donna_fitzgerald/2009/05/11/the-fourth-great-lie/
In addressing the repeatability of the success of a project based on previously successful projects, there are several factors that come to mind, not the least of which is the depending on the documentation of the successful projects. In every case that I can think of the documentation covers what was done, not what was considered in the decision to do it.
At some point in the project there was a crux where the options were abc, def and xyz – because of the factors existing at the time the decision was made. Xyz was selected and turned out to be the correct decision for that time – not necessarily the proper decision if the project factors of time, location, and/or personnel had been different which in every other case they would be. What were the factors that eliminated abc and def or elevated xyz to the forefront? In most cases we will never know.
The second biggest issue is serendipity. Sometimes just plain dumb luck makes things turn out fine. Few if any ever say that there biggest success came from luck – they just document the success.
So in summary, there is no guarantee that a project that is done with a different set of time,location,personnel, or technology, will work the same as the original successful project. The number of variables increases as the complexity of the project therefore the changes of repeatability go down.
Thanks for linking back. I’m always delighted to see where my line of thinking leads others. You correctly focused on what Gerald Nadler (author of Breakthrough Thinking: The Seven Principles of Creative Problem Solving) calls the uniqueness principle. There is a certain non-repeatability quotient attached to all projects. Understanding this non-repeatability and in fact capitalizing on it is what separates good PMs from great PMs. You also indirectly touched on why communities of practice are so important. It seems that we never think to question why A and not B when alternative A is presented to us as a best practice from a PMO. BUT if we’re sitting across a table from someone telling us a story about how they were successful with a project by choosing A, we might ask them why they didn’t chose B. As you pointed out the true value in knowledge sharing is in knowing why A or B made sense in that specific case rather than in just knowing that A worked.