CHAPTER 1 A WILLINGNESS TO LEARN FROM THE PAST

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

—Harry S. Truman

The best PMs are always thinking about what’s in front of them in the context of what they’ve learned from the past. And if that past wasn’t always great, they won’t blindly, irrationally assume that things will be better this time, especially when there’s no evidence to support that optimism. Even if (maybe especially if) they hear, “It’s different this time, really.” Here’s what they know: Without a change in thinking and approach, no, it isn’t.

It’s the first question I ask when I’m interviewing PMs: What did you learn from your last project experience? And it’s a bad sign if they take a long time answering.

The best PMs are always asking: What have we learned here? And how can we apply what we’ve learned going forward? More specifically, what have we learned that’ll allow us to:

Repeat the good outcomes, and

Make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again?

It’s a key question to ask about any PM or organization that works on projects: has he, she, or it ever made the same project mistakes more than once? If so, they’re not learning—not learning about the critical importance of comprehensive project closeout reports (see Chapter 16) or about the importance of planning for and tracking mandatory performance deliverables (see Chapter 9), for example. The best PMs institutionalize learning; they won’t compromise on the need to do project closeout reports on every project, and you’ll see them run reviews at the end of every phase of a project to ensure their team gets better, every step of the way.