A question about "Changes"

[johnsmith180]

Hi

How would you answer the following question:

"Provide an analysis of changes made as the project progressed and lessons learned from the experience."????

Whats does it mean by "Changes"?

Does it mean: 'changes to the planned work activities'.

Or 'changes that occured within the organisation because of this project' ????

What "lessons" can be learned from such experience???

I hope someone can help.
regards

 

[A0C61ZZ]

I would assume changes to the project's triad of quality, cost, time. Every other change is immaterial as long as it does NOT affect the project.

Lessons - Those are purely personal & subjective. As a start you can identify the failures, pitfalls, delays, conflicts encountered during and with the project and build lessons learned around these.
- A0C61ZZ

 

[PDQBach]

Your boss is referring specifically to the project, not to the impact on the organization.

As your project developed, there were variations from the original scope. Each of those variations is called a "change" and you use "change management" to document the changes to the project scope (i.e, the product deliverables) and the changes to the project deliverables (time, cost, quality). For each change you prepared a document that described the change to the project and got approvals for the change.

So ... the first thing your boss wants is a summary of that documentation. I'd put a single para for each of the approved changes (brief description of the change requested, date proposed, deltas on the date and cost, who approved it and when it was approved).

"Lessons learned" is easier and harder. It's easier because all you're trying to do is say "If I knew then what I know now, I would not have done this". So all you have to do is list the "I wouldn't have done this because it worked really poorly" items. It's harder because you also need to describe what improvements could be made to the processes and why they would work better on other projects in the future.