Given Hapunda

234 things can be improved within the project. Regularly asking project staff and stakeholders their views is necessary to enable the workers and stakeholders to report immediately when they sense danger or deviations of project objectives. Critical reflection can help to detect a lack of control and risks. 3. Project staff and stakeholders should be encouraged to provide constructive feedback. This is necessary to provide as assurance that project staff provide their views on remedial action that they see appropriate. 4. Valuing field visits and exchange visits help to encourage critical reflection. Field visits may help in detecting a lack of control measures and in identifying risks that may stifle impact. Visits to the project sites may facilitate feedback from people with whom the project interacts with and those that benefit from the project. 5. Organisations also need to put in place incentives for critical reflection. Given the fact that many people might not see the immediate benefits of critical reflection, incentives must be in place to encourage staff and stakeholder to engage in critical reflection. Learning in Projects Learning within the projects is useful in assisting project staff to learn from action and experience to promote individual and organisational growth. Action and experience in themselves to not however lead to learning. Critical reflection aids learning at a deeper transformative level. The question perhaps that might be bothering you as you read is “what is a lesson learnt”. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines lessons learnt as learning gained from the process of performing the project (Jugdev, 2012; Reich & Wee, 2006) while the International Fund Agriculture Development [IFAD] (2002) defines lesson learnt as knowledge derived from experience that is sufficiently well founded and can be generalised so that it has the potential to improve action. Based on these definition, we see that a lesson leant is any learning that emerges out of being part of the project. Lessons learnt can develop out of the evaluation process as evaluators reflect on their experiences in undertaking the evaluation or when project implementers/stakeholders reflect on their experiences. It is worthwhile to document these reasons for ongoing current or future projects so that knowledge derived from experience can be used for organisational growth. Lessons learnt can be both good (what worked well) and bad (what did not work well so that it could be improved upon). Learning is key not only in organisational development but also in project implementation. Growing evidence suggests that learning is a key requirement for the success of any project (Gray, 2007). Evidence-based learning and decision-making is important if the project is to

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODAyMDc0