Microsoft OneNote makes it easy to categorize projects by maintaining separate 'notebooks' for every aspect of your job and your life. Because OneNote is incredibly flexible and powerful, it has received several positive reviews for not only but also for providing an outstanding. Inside every notebook, users can create pages and insert related files, email and voice mail messages, notes, phone and billing records, and more. To get started with MS OneNote project management, we will look at both a notebook and a page template and then talk about how to share OneNote notebooks over the LAN or the Web. Microsoft OneNote Project Management Notebook To facilitate MS OneNote project management, Microsoft has a template available for download from the. When installed, this template gives project managers and team members a head start by configuring sections and pages for tracking time,, recording phone calls, and planning reviews. With this template, all the flexibility and power of OneNote is available in configuration designed especially for managing a project. When downloading this template using Microsoft Internet Explorer, the template will automatically install via an Active X control and then open into a new OneNote notebook. Of course, the notebook can be modified and adapted to meet the demands of a particular project or work environment and then saved as a local template that is always ready for a new project. In the project management notebook, five notebook sections are available in the left column as well as in tabs displayed at the top. These sections are Review, Planning and Tracking, Phone Calls, Meetings, and Calendars. The pages inside each notebook section are displayed in the column to the right of the OneNote page. Of course, new pages and sections can be added to the project notebook as needed. Jan 14, 2013 A PostMortem Template. Posted on January 15, 2013 by Dwain Fagerberg. Pingback: Project Exam – Post-Mortem – Mille Creative. Leave a Reply Cancel. Project status report presentation. From office.microsoft.com SWOT analysis examples. Business Plan TemplateSwot Analysis ExamplesData EntryBusiness PlanningProject ManagementTemplates. The post mortem template makes getting organized for your post mortem meeting much easier than if you go it alone. The template is free here. Post mortem analysis, post mortem template powerpoint project post mortem powerpoint, software post mortem template docs, report template sales report template all. Presentation for project post-mortem. At the conclusion of a project, review the successes and challenges with the team using this presentation template. This file downloads the same way as the notebook template does, but when it installs, it becomes a page in a notebook and is available by selecting it as the default template for a new page using the combo box at the bottom of OneNote's right hand column. If the 'Templates' column is not visible, click the downward pointing arrow to the right of 'New Page' and then select 'Page Templates' from the context menu. After selecting the post-mortem stationery as the default, a click on the 'New Page' tab of a notebook section will insert a new post-mortem page into that section. Sharing a Project Mangement Notebook A powerful feature of MS OneNote project management is that the notebooks created to organize the project are shareable over the network. This means that at any given time team members can view, edit, and add information that is relevant to the project in real time, giving workers a To share a notebook, click the 'File' option on the main menu and then click 'Share' on the left. Users can choose to share the notebook on the Web (using Windows Live), on a shared local network folder, or on a SharePoint server. ![]() Closing Thoughts Microsoft OneNote is a powerful software application that helps organize and centralize a wide variety of tasks done on the computer, including project management. The templates listed here are a starting point for developing the MS OneNote project management. Sharing notebooks is a great way to make sure the whole team has access to the latest information about the project. Once OneNote is deployed as a project management tool, life may never be the same again. Image Credits: Screen shots taken by Bruce Tyson. We already talked about the, a tool intended to prevent failure instead of learning from it. This is the perfect and desired scenario, of course. But let’s be honest: shit will hit the fan. No matter the extent of the disaster, when your project fails, you can still take solace in that you’ll learn from it. But to really learn from it and make it helpful in the future, you have to formalize the process a bit. The post-mortem is the perfect tool for that. Most people know what is a post-mortem: the examination of something after it happened to find out why it succeeded or failed. A post-mortem is usually performed at the end of a project, and lessons learned can be applied for further projects. Any project, success or failure, will lead to lessons learned in some way, although the second may be especially prolific in this regard. Even when a project is a total failure, a post-mortem represents the opportunity to learn and move forward, and to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again. How to Conduct a Post-mortem Here are the steps to follow to conduct a successful post-mortem. Prior to the meeting, invite the project team and brief them on the plan. Send the questions you will address in advance so people can think about it and know what to expect. Want to make sure you run a super-productive post-mortem meeting? Send a survey to the project team before the meeting to gather lessons learned and dig through them during the meeting. This also allows you to gather feedback from people who cannot attend or will not be invited to the post-mortem meeting (in the case of a very large project). Make sure you have a white board in the room and bring some pens and paper. And then, follow these steps: • Start the meeting by summarizing the project mission and initial objectives: People may be working on many projects or already have been reassigned to new ones and a refresh will be helpful for everyone. Remember, people forget things. ![]() • Present the project outcomes: Present key outcomes of the project, and any evaluation you have at hand (from the client by example). • Generate discussion on lessons learned: Prompt the team with questions like: Are you proud of the project deliverables? What went wrong? What could we have done better? What went well? What can we do to replicate it/make it consistent? ![]() • Generate lessons learned and solutions: Propose a set of lessons learned and solutions. You want to make sure the meeting is solution-oriented, and uplift the level of discussion so it’s not just complaining. Record all lessons learned on a white board. • Wrap-up: Thanks everybody for their honesty and input. Here are three key rules to make sure the discussion remains constructive. It may be a good idea to display them on a board so everybody can see them at any moment. First, we want people to be honest and comfortable to say things straight (rule #1). But it’s not a place to blame specific people, which would not contribute to create a climate of trust and be useless at that point (rule #2). And finally, the whole point is to stay solution-oriented (rule #3). It is so easy to criticize, but the point of this meeting is to come up with lessons learned and solutions, not a bunch of complaints. 3 Key Rules 1. Speak the truth 2. No finger pointing 3. Be solution-oriented And the most important thing: make sure to follow up with a report and share it with the right people. Too often, post-mortems are part of the companies’ processes; they are held, reports are written, and then nothing is done with that. Lessons learned stay in a report that is not read by anyone. New projects are undertaken without referring to lessons learned from similar projects. What a waste! The aim of a post-mortem is not only to act as a closing meeting for the project. After all, as stated in the article “A defined process for project post-mortem review”,. Or in other words: “.” From my project management experience, this is where we have a problem. We do hold post-mortem meetings. We gather brilliant insights that could make the difference for further projects. And then, we forget about it, bury them in a folder or an electronic document management system in which finding the relevant information is an impossible task. And then, we wonder why we repeat the same mistakes over and over again. The problem is also that often, lessons learned relate to the organization level, not the team. So if they stay within the team, issues will remain. For example, one lesson learned I saw over and over in post-mortem meetings relates to human resource availability. Not having the right people at the right time brings big challenges that reach beyond the boundaries of the project. Not only will the project be delayed, cost more money and fail to meet the needs of its stakeholders, but it will impact other projects as well. Here’s why: if your project is delayed due to missing key resources, other projects that rely on the same resources will be as well when people work on your project at unplanned time (when they’re supposed to be working on another project, which will then go through the same issue as you). We tend to get a domino effect, where one resource issue on a project leads to planning-related issues for a larger number of projects. This leads to a crisis mentality, where people have to work on what becomes an emergency instead of preventing such complications from happening. But the solution to that has to come from organizational processes, and the team can’t do much more than share this challenge (and pray that something is done about it). Actually, this is such an acute issue in organization that we built software to solve it, you can check it out. All this to say: when something has to change at the organizational level, make sure to notify the right people about it, as the top management or the head of the corresponding department. Make sure something is done about it, follow-up on the issue, and keep your team informed about it. This is not only the decent thing to do to make sure the organization improves, but it will prove to your team that you consider their input and do everything in your power to make things happen. This may sound unrealistic especially in a large organization, but let’s try to be an agent of change instead of giving up already. Who knows, we may have more power than we think when we give it an honest try. Post-Mortems Are Not Just For Single & Completed Projects As suggested by, the post-mortem technique can be applied for other endeavors than a single project, such as any of the other ongoing operations. You can use it in a recurring manner that fits with your processes, such as every week, month, quarter or year. You can have different types of post-mortems for each of those frequencies. Of course, an annual post-mortem will tend to be more strategic and macro-oriented than a weekly one. Agile teams hold retrospectives (different names, same thing) in order to inspect and adapt their way of working. Ben Linders, author of “” also shares valuable tools to run these meetings, like a check-in with one word that summarizes how team members are feeling and asking several “whys” to get to the root of the matter. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen also wrote a book on the topic called “” in which they give advice on how to hold those kinds of meetings effectively, and make sure they’re not a waste of time (which can happen if not correctly done). Not Group Therapy Be careful that your post-mortem meetings don’t become group therapy. Of course, this meeting can be helpful for individuals to vent, but the goal is to make it constructive. Maybe the project has been a total disaster, but it would be useless to complain without being constructive. Let’s keep in mind rule #3 and stay solution-oriented. Some people may come up with relevant shortcomings but find it harder to come up with fixes, so you should be ready to delve further and ask questions to generate solutions as well. A Last Few Tips As suggested by Leslie Wolf, having an external facilitator and a scribe, especially for a large project,. Even if the idea of inviting clients to your post-mortems is a frequently debated topic, having them can have a lot of benefits. As mentioned by Simon Heaton: “.” Furthermore, another benefit of inviting them to this meeting is to show how much you value their business and feedback, and prove you wish to improve over time. We’d love to hear about you. What are the lessons learned you keep hearing over and over again? Let us know in the comments! You found this article useful? Why not send it to your colleagues before holding your next post-mortem? Just hit the share button:-).
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