It’s is of vital importance to capture knowledge as your projects progress if you want to improve in the future. In this blog, we explain how Method Grid can help you with this process and why it is so important.
Most projects have a broadly similar approach:
- They start with definition (what you want)
- Then some design (what it might look like)
- Then some pricing, tendering and contract (procurement)
- Then delivery, implementation or construction (making it real)
- Finally, handover and operations (living with what you created)
The really good projects then have lessons learned, feedback and continuous improvement. It is at this stage that things come to a grinding halt. Project teams tend to be temporary or transient by nature and often have diverse supply chains and players involved. There is a tendency to want to go so fast during the project that no reflection is allowed or move on to the next great project before you capture best practice. Or if the project has not gone well, it is seen as “revisiting the scene of the crime!”
So, what you need is a simple system to allow you to capture the overall approach taken, break it down into sensible gateways and then link to all your deliverables and activities. We have found that Method Grid does this. What’s more is it also enables us to drop in all our best practice examples, templates, guidance notes, points of contacts and even further sources like videos and websites and your internal or external experts. What makes this special is that your knowledge is captured in the context of the process or approach that you are adopting, so it makes sense to those who pick it up next time. You can keep adding and updating in the future as new great ideas or ways of working emerge.
No-one likes doing things twice or repeating work that others have learned or done before. It is just wasted effort. Having the ability to capture knowledge as you go in the most time effective way is essential and after all, there is no time like the present. Method Grid is proving to be a tool that we can control risk, avoid mistakes, train effectively and improve project delivery. The benefits to quality control, training, induction and consistency of service are tangible and immediate.