Donna Fitzgerald

As I mentioned in my last post I’ve started to read the book Stand Back and Deliver and so far I’ve had an interesting insight. In the first chapter there is a great story about an ERP project gone bad. As I was reading the story I pulled out my highlighter and start listing in the margins all the things that a future project could do differently to avoid the fate of the project described in the book… and then I stopped. It suddenly occured to me that if I lacked the experience to tell a similar story to the one in the book based on my own experience, then no list of best practice would actually help me because I simply wouldn’t recognize the issues in time. I also realized how much harder it is to remember a list of best practices and how much easier it is to remember the story of an unnecessary employee reimbursement application (an example in the book).

So does this realization mean that I don’t think there’s value in best practices? Of course not. What it does mean is that I’m a strong believer that best practices need to used in conjunction with a community of practice or in a PMO 2.0 environment where people can share their tacit knowledge and hence make the advise both stickier and more actionable.

So on that note I’d like to invite you to share your story of a project that either went very well or very poorly and what YOU learned as a result of the experience. After all that’s how all of us really improve our ability to lead projects is by either learning ourselves or learning from each other.