In our latest think-piece, project manager Jodie Crowfoot highlights the team’s work around learning lessons from recent releases
As the Dorset Care Record (DCR) enters its fourth year of being a live system and after a number of different functionality releases, we have now established a successful process by which we record and action any lessons learnt from previous releases.
During a release we maintain documentation which key people on the project can access, so we can add lessons learnt throughout the process. These lessons can be things we want to keep as they have gone well or things that we want to improve on in future releases as they have not been as successful.
Once a release has been delivered into the live environment we hold a session with all parties that have been involved, including partners and our supplier along with key members of the PMO and add any further lessons learnt identified and update these with actions, action owners and target completion dates.
We also log all of our lessons learnt and their actions onto our issue and project tracking software, Jira. This means we have a central repository that everyone can access and maintain. We also provide a short presentation at the end of the release to our Working Group and Programme Board regarding the number of lessons learnt that have been identified, the actions that we have identified and our next steps going forward.
Previously in the project, any actions that had been identified as part of a lessons learnt process had remained incomplete as there hadn’t been a process for checking they had been actioned. To combat this issue, we now hold monthly lessons learnt review meetings which are attended by all lessons learnt action owners and they will receive a prompt a week in advance of the meeting and then the session is used to ensure they are updated and as we approach a new release, we are carrying much fewer lessons learnt.
This process has seen huge benefits to the running of our release process and our communications with our partners. We have created key project documents such as our delivery charter and a skeleton plan on the back of actions from this process and have significantly improved the process where partners are required to turn off feeds in advance of a drop to a new environment. It has also been important for the PMO to reflect upon what has happened and something that has been more challenging has been acknowledging when things have gone well but as our release process becomes much slicker, these positive reflections are becoming a more regular occurrence.
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