Learning From the Work As We Do It: Work planning as a learning process

A?project close out write-up ?from the City of Asheville Communication and Public Engagement (CAPE) team, Kristina Israel, reminded me of an important benefit I had not thought about as much: the opportunity for organizational learning.

The project was to create a Neighborhood Issue Tracker (Silo Buster) to break down communication silos within the organization, helping staff be more aware of the issues most relevant to communities as they engage them.

If I skip over the key successes (which we should never do, so let’s take a moment to celebrate ?????? … more on that below), what strikes me is how relevant most of it is well beyond this particular project or department.

Much of the learning had to do specifically with doing projects.

Scope and Budget

For example, one of the challenges Kristina identified was the fact that not everyone on the project team interpreted the project goal the same way, leading to a need to guard against scope creep. In a different project this kind of misunderstanding might create more havoc, even derail the project altogether.

That’s a good reminder that a key component of a project kickoff meeting is a discussion of exactly what a successful outcome looks like and, equally importantly, what it does not.

Scope came up in an interesting way again in the Learnings section. With no allocated budget, the Silo Buster project had to operate within strict constraints. In this instance, the constraints turned out to fuel creative use of an existing tool (aided by a new team member’s willingness to quickly become a Public Input expert). In a different project, however, imposing a constraint like this too early might lead to an inadequate solution or to significant delay.

This seems like another opportunity to ask questions before even beginning the project. Can we solve this with existing tools? If it turns out not, is there a fast-track to accessing financial resources? If not, it probably makes sense to commit only to a feasibility and strategy phase and postpone the implementation phase until budget issues are resolved. The key here is to anticipate the kinds of issues that might arise in order to be prepared to handle them.

Change and Uncertainty

Another theme was responding to changed circumstances, including things learned along the way.

The Downtown Safety Initiative (DSI), for example, was a major unplanned demand on staff that was bound to have an impact on the project. Somewhat serendipitously, the DSI became an opportunity to beta test the tool and so actually turned out to support the SiloBuster initiative, but it could just as easily have created a conflict.

One of the goals of the organizational work plan was to enable staff to see everything we’re working on so that we are in a better position to make trade-off decisions. But of course we have to make a point of asking the question: if a major new project is being added, what do we need to adjust to accommodate it? Do we need to put something on hold? Or perhaps there is an opportunity to connect it to other existing work, as turned out to be the case here. In any case, this seems like something that we should integrate into a normal OWP project workflow.

The other change that Kristina mentioned was that learning along the way made one of the original milestones in the plan irrelevant. That’s perfectly normal - projects often involve an initial exploration or investigation phase that then clarifies what’s actually involved in the implementation. But it does mean that we may need to take a more iterative approach to building out milestones, where appropriate.

Learning Beyond the Work Plan

One of the challenges Kristina listed was software/systems fatigue. They found that “staff across the organization are already overwhelmed with the selection of software and user-created trackers” and they feared that this new tool and process would just “‘add one more thing’ to an already cumbersome set of processes.”

The Budget & Performance team is obviously responsible for some of those processes, so we take this very seriously for our own work. Identifying ways to simplify and improve our budget, work planning and performance data processes will be a significant focus over the next few months.

But this is a learning that applies well beyond our team. What are some ways that we as an organization can begin to streamline some of our processes? How can we identify opportunities for different processes to develop shared approaches, whether by using the same tools or by actually finding ways to interconnect processes, as we’ve begun trying to do within the new combined budget/ODAP team.

And Back to the Party ??

It’s a good thing to celebrate success. So much of our work is never-ending; we need to mark those moments when we actually get something over a finish line.

But even beyond celebrating, taking time at the end of a project to reflect on what happened, what worked and what didn’t, and then sharing that with others in the organization and beyond is a way for all of us to learn and improve. Thanks to Kristina Israel and CAPE for the opportunity to learn from them today!

Meet The Writer

Eric Jackson is a 35-year technology industry veteran who has worked in technical and executive roles in scientific research and computing, venture-capital backed enterprise software startups, and municipal government. The constant through all these endeavors has been the use of data to develop insights, make decisions, and support accountability. He currently serves as the manager of the Office of Data and Performance in the Budget & Performance division of the City of Asheville Finance department.