Remembering the Context of the Original Decision

I was talking with a colleague of mine about a communications system we put in place for compliance training.

You know Wendy, the lesson here is that we shouldn’t be half- assing these projects. We should do this right the first time. I mean, we have this Talent Management thing that could take care of it that’s eventually coming…

It’s been 12-18 months since we put that system together.  Let’s remember what we knew at the time.

• There was no Talent Management system on the radar
• We didn’t recognize that communications and communications tracking for these programs were going to be this important.
• We didn’t have a lot of time to implement 
• We couldn’t assume that there would be money to implement a new solution 

So the decisions we made were to use what we had on hand. 
These were the best decisions at the time.

Oh yeah, I forgot that it was that long ago….But I figured that the system would only be in place 6 months and then we would replace it.


I don’t think we even knew THAT much then. 

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One of the things my mentors in the University of Georgia History Department kept emphasizing to me was to not look at decisions or beliefs based on the contemporary environment but on the environment at the time.

At the time we built the system, we worked in a completely different environment.

We now have some new variables to play with.

Also, since we HAVE a beta, cobbled together with what was lying around the office, we now know

• How important the problem is.  
• The measure wasn’t necessarily from the immediate need for the solution.  Everyone needs a solution “right now”.  The real measure of importance here was how often the client(s) used it and referred the solution to others.  
• What is working and what isn’t.
• What changes we need to make to make the system easy to administer / access / use
• What requirements we have for the next redesign to make stuff work better
• Whether we need to purchase something or see if there is anything coming down the pike that meets those requirements.

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A while back – this article on Post-Implementation Projects crossed my email.

We never give ourselves the chance to see what is happening once we put our new system out in the wild.   We want to skip the “evaluation” part and move on to other things. 

As I’m noticing in my environment the past couple of years – solutions can no longer be seen as “permanent.”  And I am thinking that permanence was a fallacy to begin with.