Recent Posts

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The bright side of project practices

A good article on Projects @ Work about looking at the positives on projects rather than only concentrating on the negatives: On the Bright Side

The idea is to do MORE of the things that went well. Unfortunately, since the tendency is to concentrate on the bad and fix it, we forget the positives and to do more of those. Human beings' tendency to forget what went well and magnify what went wrong is epic. There are a # of studies in customer service that have shown that when a person has a positive experience at a business, s/he will tell 4 friends/acquaintances about it. However, if s/he had a negative experience, s/he will tell 9 friends/acquaintances about it! No wonder we quickly forget what went great and go for the bad...

In this vein, at my own workplace I am suggesting that PMs at the end of each project reflect and think about 3 things that went well about the project and that they would do again (so those are positively reinforced) and 1 or 2 not-so good things (so those could be rectified).

This kind of reflection will increase awareness of the positive things so we can bring those best practices forward into future projects.

No comments: