Sometimes I feel like Bill Murray

What now seems like a very long time ago, Bill Murray starred in a little film called Groundhog Day. Sometimes I can really relate to that film, we keep doing things over and over.

At Macadamian, we take a lot of pride in "Constant Improvement", in fact its one of the Cs in this blog title. As part of this process, at the end of each project we do what we call a "Phoenix Session". Also known as a project post-mortem. One of the outputs of this process is what we call the "Lesson Learned". Usually, we learn at least one lesson, sometimes two.

The problem with this process is that the "Lesson Learned" gets documented in Confluence, and becomes "Yet another page no one ever seems to read". Many of these "Lesson Learned" are very insightful and useful, and while we send them now to the entire operations leadership, we fail to teach them to our project champions.

This is true for PL101 training in general. We are all so busy, we often rely on what many call OJT. Out of the most recent batch of "Lessons Learned" there was one re-learning what was actually documented in the "Client Deliverable" process. Documented on Confluence. Oh, and its actually the first page in our PL101 training.

I don't blame the champion for this, that person didn't have the knowledge or the skills. I blame us. We as an organization have to better support our champions, PLs, and new developers.

This will help them not feel isolated and left out to dry. We already have a mentoring program for new employees, now we need to extend this to new champions, PLs, and of course, PMs.