Thursday, January 12, 2012

Learning from a Project Post Mortem

I decided to use one of the largest "personal" projects that I have taken on to examine under the lens of a project post mortem this week - the renovation/restoration of our house.

Having a plan in place that considers scope, budget and time-line

Our House - Before.
My husband and I purchased a century home in 2003, with the goal of renovating and restoring it over five years (as means allowed), and then selling it to buy the home we figured we would raise our family in.  We identified what we wanted to do (scope), estimated what we wanted to spend (budget) and decided that we would do this work over the course of five years (time-line).  I even created a beautiful Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) in MS Project for the first phase of the work on the house.

Expect the unexpected

The only original item that we managed to stick to was the time-line.  A few months into the project, we discovered that we were expecting our first child. With that discovery, the overall needs and plan of the project radically altered - as did the resources (both from a human resources and financial resources perspective).  As I read through Greer's (2010) post mortem questions related to Needs and Feasibility, around missing needs up front - I confess, I had a bit of a chuckle.  I'm rather uptight about identifying needs early on in a project (because un-identified needs that come up later on, come with a cost), and have limited tolerance for PMs who don't identify all potential needs in the beginning.  Looking at my house project though, gives me a different perspective.  Things do change (constantly).  As such, we do need to build in contingencies to deal with when needs do change, and be willing and able to shift when required.  In the case of our house, originally we planned to have a master bedroom, a spare bedroom, a music room and two offices.  In the end, our house ended up with three bedrooms and two offices.  We thought originally that we could manage with the one bathroom that the house had.  As we started having children though, and realized that "this" was going to be the house that we would be raising our children in, we added another bathroom into the plan.

Celebrate the successes

Our House - After.
Greer's first question on the post mortem list is "Are you proud of the finished deliverables?"  Absolutely we are.  The entire project took a tremendous amount of work, resources and time - but we are very happy with the finished results.  We invested more into the project than we originally planned to given that we planned to live in the house longer, and needed it to support being our home and work environments.  Each time we were faced with "scope creep", we carefully looked at the impact to time and budget and made our decisions accordingly.  The year that we finished the exterior work, one of our neighbors entered us into our property into local "Communities in Bloom" competition.  Much to our surprise, against very stiff competition - we won 1st place in the Residential Category.  That was a very gratifying, but unexpected result.
An area of pride.
The items that worked well in the project, were those that we had the clearest vision of "what" we wanted to accomplish.  For example, in our side yard we had a space where we wanted to have a seating area where we could have the experience of being completely surrounded by flowers in the summer.  We sketched the area out, and knew it great detail what it would look like down to the specific type of stone work and plants that would be in that space.  My husband and I did all of the work in that space (so there were fewer communication issues than if we were working with contractors).

Learn from the mistakes

If I could wave a magic wand and change anything about the project, it would be how I handled some of the external contractors that we hired.  We had significantly different experiences with contractors throughout the project, and much of the difference hinged on the contracts that we had in place up front.  As a trained and experienced project manager, I "should" have known better.  But, knowing what to do, doesn't always translated into doing what we should do.

References:

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

  1. AnonymousJanuary 14, 2012 at 4:45 PM

    Kay, first of all let me say “congratulations!” on a great home renovation. Your landscaping is wonderful. As an HGTV-aholic and rabid do-it-yourselfer, I have seen more than my share of renovations and you can justly be proud.

    I have shared your experience of making the careful plan, and discovering that the only thing that doesn’t change is the likelihood of change! I agree with you that the smaller your crew the easier it is to accomplish your project- probably because communication is easier.

    About those contractors though, I wonder what you learned from them and how it might transfer to future collaboration on ID projects? You mentioned contracts. Did you learn that you needed to be more specific? Less specific?

    (Where are you and do you like to swap plants? I have some great agaves…)
    Lydia Freeman

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    1. Kay GreenJanuary 15, 2012 at 7:30 PM

      Thanks Lydia! My husband and I often would shake our head through this project and say "They make it look so easy on HGTV...";)

      With regards to contractors, there are definitely some lessons learned that can be applied and transfered to ID projects:

      a) Beware of Time and Material Contracts without a very defined scope.
      - When we dealt with time and material contracts (vs. contracts where the project was scoped and estimated up front), we often paid much more than we planned. Clearly defining scope and having a clear, written estimate to work from helps greatly in keeping projects within budget.

      b) Ensure that contractors have the required experience to do what they say they can do.
      - Said another way, ask for and check references. We were under the gun with getting the house re-wired when we bought it (due to insurance reasons) - and took the first electrician we could find who gave us a good quote. Unfortunately, this electrician had no experience with re-wiring older homes. Cleaning up the damage that this electrician did cost as much as the wiring job itself. It was a painful lesson - and we would have been much better off waiting and finding an electrician that could do things right the first time (and had the experience behind them to know what to do).

      I'm in Fort Erie Canada (right across the river from Buffalo NY). We are in one of the warmest gardening zones in Ontario - but I don't think agaves would handle our snow well! :)

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  2. kamilah juniorJanuary 15, 2012 at 3:21 PM

    I first want to start by saying I love what you have done with your home it is beautiful! I also wanted to say that I enjoyed reading your post and seeing the before and after pics.
    It seems that your PM experience has really paid off since you were able to plan out your whole remodeling process (with the exception of life's unexpected things). My only question to you was about your contractors comment;We had significantly different experiences with contractors throughout the project, and much of the difference hinged on the contracts that we had in place up front. As a trained and experienced project manager, I "should" have known better. Do you mean that you didn't do enough research on the contractors selected or that you went into contract so early on with contractors who didn't have a good work ethic? I know that can cause many issues and time constraints dealing with contractors who drag their feet.

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    1. Kay GreenJanuary 15, 2012 at 7:41 PM

      Thanks so much Kam!

      With regards to contractors, we had some absolutely fabulous ones - who did great work, on time and within budget. More often than I should admit though, when we found ourselves tight for time - we would rely more on a "handshake" than on a proper contract. This got us into trouble a few times. When we contracted our tile work (kitchen and bathrooms), we had significant issues with the contractor wanting payment much earlier than we anticipated because we did not outline a payment schedule up front. We paid directly for all materials, and paid 50% up front for the labour with the agreement that we would pay the other 50% when the job was completed. With roughly 10% of the work done - the contractor wanted another installment... Working from a verbal agreement vs. a signed contract that outlined the payment schedule made things difficult.

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  3. Mary DurrJanuary 15, 2012 at 6:28 PM

    This is a great project. I love your home, specially the after, it is amazing. According to Portny, Mantel, Meredith Shafer, Sutton, & Kramer (2008) suggested planning a project based on life cycle phases. All projects changes over time and there are always the unknown, unknown that will creep up in anything that we do. However, looking at the phases of a project’s life cycle in the beginning such as conceive, define, start, and perform, perhaps, would have help to decrease frustration within the project’s unknown.

    It is also, according to Portny et al., (2008), good to establish "who, how much, and when" in the life of the project because we live in the midst of limited resources and not enough time. Does that sound familiar to you? It has been my experience when working on a project that I find myself with more work than time and/or resources to complete the project. However, as a project manager our job is to view the project’s task and determine how to make it a success. For those familiar projects, Portny et al., (2008) suggest using the Work Breakdown Structure Top Down approach. For example, top down approaches is starting at the top and meticulously developing details for all activities (home restoration). Specifying all work assignments to complete the task requirement is laid out during the planning stages. Determining what part(s) of the task is required to complete each work assignment. Specify or identify the subtasks needed to complete the project.
    Your home is beautiful, you should very proud of your accomplishments’.

    Reference

    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.

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    1. Kay GreenJanuary 15, 2012 at 7:53 PM

      Thanks Mary!

      Sage advice - projects do have a tendancy to grow in scope (as we definitely found with this one) which impact the time and resources.

      Overall, with this project in hindsight - the elements where I did the work to do a detailed WBS were the ones that were the most successful (as you suggest). When changes in scope did occur, we were able to manage the changes to time and budget more effectively.

      - Kay

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  4. AnonymousJanuary 15, 2012 at 8:28 PM

    Kay,

    After looking at the pictures of your beautiful house, I would consider your project a success. As Sasha (2012) pointed out on Marcus’ blog, seeing a project through to the end is a success in itself. Success doesn’t always mean the completion of a project within the originally proposed time frame. Success might mean that a project is lengthened, avoided, or delayed for the benefit of the organization. The key success indicator in this case was the question, “Are you proud of our finished deliverables” (Greer, 2010). I think that both you and Marcus could claim success even though the timeline wasn’t ideal.

    References:

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

    Taranto, S. (2012). [Blog post comment]. Retrieved from http://margreen.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/project-post-mortem-to-tile-or-not-to-tile/#comments

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  5. Lisa ElliottJanuary 15, 2012 at 8:41 PM

    Hi Kay!!

    What a project! I love what you have done with your home. The fact that you were able to keep your time line was amazing. Expecting a little one can alter so many things in your life.

    I commend you for sticking to your plans and meeting your goals. You have done such a great job with your renovations.

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  6. AnonymousJanuary 15, 2012 at 11:01 PM

    Hello Kay:
    Hello Kay.
    It is hard in order to establish controling factors in the planning process of remodeling such a big project. What we must keep in mind is that we can always get in control. We are always in control of all that we do.

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