“Every moment is a learning point. At the end of a mission, learning from your experiences especially third party perspective is a great way to cover for your blind spots.”
Running projects comes with some level of experience but as this happens, there’s a point that you get to that most of the work happens to be continuous playing out that you fail to see areas of improvement as much. It’s a phase termed project management lethargy and often times it’s a phase where as a much as you intend to perfect your skill you might never be able to improve. How does this happen you may ask? It happens when you are accustomed to the routine that nothing seems to be out of place and you are closed to change.
Debriefs are follow up questioning and deliberations to reflect on the outcomes of a particular project gauging on the set objectives at the start of the session, reflecting on whether they were achieved, areas of improvement and key action items moving forward. Being most projects are executed by different stakeholders, it’s of essence that all parties involved take part in a project debrief to ensure that observations from each and every group are captured. This evening we were honored to host our first #LadiesTalk session for the year a series of sessions set to run monthly for the entire year. At the end of the session, we had a moment to deliberate with the guest and co-hosts for the session where we highlighted some key features that if at all we didn’t have the debrief session, we wouldn’t have had. The insights from the guest speaker were critical factoring the aspect that she runs projects thus able to share some of the best practices from her end while also highlighting the challenges on our end to create room for improvement. As an outsider to our work, it’s easy to observe from a vantage point seeing both the positives and the flaws. The positives are motivators to continue with the work, the flaws are a pointer that we can do better. Putting these into perspective, we get to improve and offer better services moving forward and this is the goal.
This piece is a call to you who is running projects or executing an initiative in any space, to consider integrating debrief session as a critical piece of your work in order to pick up insights and the wealth of knowledge that other people have. It helps set pace for your next project with much more value integrated in it.