Common Lessons Learned Mistakes, Misconceptions and Things Left Unsaid By Rick Edwards and Shawn P. Quigley Why organizations fail to exploit their own lessons learned. “There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience”.   – Archibald MacLeish Lessons Learned – Really? Too many organizations understand Archibald’s […]

By Rick Edwards and Shawn P. Quigley How Lessons-Learned apply to the Learning Organization In our previous post, we defined Lessons Learned (LL), and discussed why the practice is so vital to the long-term viability of an organization. Now we will discuss how the disciplines practiced by Learning Organizations can unlock the full potential of […]

Why Lessons Learned are vital to the long-term vitality of organizations To best discuss any topic, we must first establish a common foundation from which to build. Let’s start by defining some key terms: 1. Lesson: an activity that is done in order to learn something; also: something is taught, a single class or part […]

Talent Planning and Project Management In many cases, succession planning only identifies individuals that are to replace existing individuals as they move up the ladder or out of the organization. This process is a “matter of fact” and does not include major planning for the individual to replace, but more like a placeholder. Grooming of […]

Project Manager and Talent A project’s success ultimately is with the talent of the team and the project manager.  There are more team members, only one project manager, and the team carries the bulk of the work even if the project manager is responsible.  The composition of the team is the very important.  Talent constraints […]

By Shawn P. Quigley Needs and Motivation – Organization and the Individual In our article “Needs, wants, and motivation” we discussed the correlation between the needs of an organization and that of the individuals who comprise it. This would be an example of “The Macro fit” or job fit as commonly stated in the Human […]

Organizational Learning Differences for the Team and Management (Mental Models) By Shawn P. Quigley In a previous post, we discussed the five principles behind Organizational Learning (L.O.). In this post, we will discuss how the different levels of an organization view the principles and why these different views make it difficult to obtain a learning organization. […]

By Shawn P. Quigley Office Politics is defined as: “(business) (functioning as singular or plural) the ways that power is shared in an organization or workplace, and the ways that it is affected by the personal relationships between the people who work there” (Collins English Dictionary, 2014) Let us first state that Office politics is […]

We will first look at direction based upon perspective. If we assume; not a good thing, we know the current status of our system and base our corrective and/or improvement actions on that, our plans will probably end up with results that are not what we are striving. We must first determine our actual starting point.