“The battle is all over except the shouting when one knows what is wanted and has made up his mind to get it, whatever the price may be.” —Napoleon Hill, America’s original self-help promoter
THERE ARE A LOT of reasons to avoid an after-project meeting — inconvenience to participants, the bother of it all when everyone is eager to move on, the possibility of members and management facing criticism and pent-up frustrations. It is especially hard to have a post-mortem when participants feel like the story of the project has already been written ( “Game Time” by Matt Evans, April 9-15, 2010, The Triad Business Journal).
Reluctant accountability
The Piedmont Triad Partnership (PTP) wrap-up for the Serious Game Group — the team of mostly educators who created the Surgical Technology Skills Builder game — was eventually accepted as a necessity, something that on-the-run lunches or beer drinking at the Triangle Game Conference could not replace. (Confession: I support beer-drinking.) Most original members attended. One missing member had already worked with me to present at TGC and the Center for Design Innovation. As project manager, I had a firm sense about his views and criticisms but would have liked to have seen the full, original team that PTP had contracted and paid present in the room to hash over our results.
As it turned out, we convened with additional education folk who’d been on the email list — not necessarily a bad thing, but in principle a hindrance. (Confession: I've met them all — all very smart professional folk I'd like to see in a meeting afterward, to discuss their specific views, suggestions, and criticisms, but not during an airing of dirty laundry.) In other words, a chance for all the team members to speak freely to one another about their impressions can’t go on without admissions of mistakes if the successes are to be believed. We really can’t move forward until we understand how we achieved success, nor can we make progress unless we understand our individual and collective mistakes. And our story was already a complicated one, with core team members hired up from High Point University, Piedmont Community College, Guilford Tech Community College, Wake Forest University, Surry Community College, Winston-Salem State University, Page High School and Forsyth Tech Community College.
Am I being picky?
I cautioned us to avoid cherry picking our impressions, highlighting the things that support our views and discarding the rest. Declaring the battle over is another way of saying we’re outta here without having to face consequences or reflect on lessons learned. Napoleon Hill, father of the American self-help mindset, figured the best way of dealing with messy process and complexity was to ignore them.
Declare victory and move on!
The end! Huzzah!
Next project, please!
Because we want to change the Piedmont’s way of doing things, we have to commit fully to the post-mortem process. Ultimately, we’re talking about changing individual human behavior. And eventually we want to change the culture of the Piedmont.
But how do we do this?
Simple: We plan a project, we execute the project, we then analyze our performance. But PTP changed tack, pulled the game from its context and began calling it a commercial product. Rather than testing the region's talent by bringing instructors and academics together, the goal became the creation of a commercially viable, income-generating work that would keep the PTP Creative Arts and Enterprises division in business after the WIRED grant came to an end. One only has to understand that marketers were brought in to analyze the game's market value only in the project's final months to appreciate the change in direction. Had PTP communicated this intention early in the project, the course of its development would have been different. But my impression was that PTP really didn't know what it wanted.
Let's stop doing "easy"
We have to stop obsessing over the easy stuff, like determining the game’s commercial prospects and start doing the hard stuff, like asking How did we achieve success? Who did what and how well did they do it? We put most of our resources in human capital so that’s what we should be looking at. We want to know team members’ actual contributions, their strengths and weaknesses and potential as leaders and advocates. The more we know about what made success or failure, the stronger we and the next project will be. After guiding the project to its end, I puzzle over why the PTP leadership believed creating a game industry here in the Triad was a good idea when we have a powerful one established in the Triangle. I don’t know who is responsible for this vision, but I do know it will take more than just the success of this project to change the Triad.
Afterthought
Maybe the new PTP Board will be willing to stick with the design and creativity initiative long enough to consider these lessons and figure out a follow up. It’d be a pity (a pretty expensive one) to see the Serious Game Group sputter out as its overseers overlook the true value of the project.
To return to the original vision, if PTP wants to develop the region's workforce, it would help the next leadership group if it had full documentation so it could understand how we achieved all that we did in such a short time. In our post-mortem meeting I didn’t hear voices converge on lessons learned, but with more rigor and fewer distractions, we might have. As project manager, I would have preferred it so. But in the meantime, let’s keep debating and discussing. Let's not declare victory, close the door, end the rancorous debate, sing Kumbaya (confession: I like the song), and say it's all over but the shouting.
