At what juncture should we look at success in a project/undertaking?
Obviously, this will depend upon the type of activity or area of operations. You can consider exploring, for example:
A particular project where safety performance was better than the typical levels of safety performance (also thinking about complexity levels and risk profile of the project)
A particular division or operation undertaken by the organisation which is celebrated as more efficient than others
A particular division or type of operation within the organisation that has less reported incidents than others
A particular area of operations that reports more near miss/hit events in general and also has less incidents
Now in broader management approaches, we investigate success from an operational perspective. And this often occurs when it comes to considering the end of a project. We will often conduct a project de-brief with our teams and with our clients, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders to find out what we can learn from how the project progressed and take that forward, feeding it through to the next projects. We should think about exploring success not just at the end of a project, but at key junctures during the project. Many of the valuable lessons will be lost if we wait until the end of a project when many of those moments (and what made them great) are long forgotten. Think about looking at success when a project commences. Why is the set up so great? Think about looking at success when the change of tempo and overlapping operations is high and watch why success is being achieved in practice in real time. Investigating success in this context does not require a retrospective approach and that means we can, to some extent, avoid many of the limitations of incident investigation discussed above.
Tips for Exploring Success
Unlike traditional incident investigations, exploring success (particularly in operations outside of a near miss or incident investigation) is not about checking particular boxes off your list. We don't have specific factors with boxes that we want to complete. That is quite purposeful. We want to remain open to hearing whatever we learn from listening to, or watching, the experience of how things are undertaken on that project or in that particular operation day to day. When exploring success, you want to understand how that success was achieved. In doing so, it is unhelpful to have a complete and exhaustive list of questions pre-determined. Because the reality is, you want to listen and watch and explore success in how operations are performed based upon what you learn in that exercise.
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