This article is about key failures that led to the COVID-19 disaster and what we can learn from them to use with our daily project management practices.

As of today, the latest count is 542,359 recorded deaths in the US and 2,716,275 deaths around the world. We know these numbers are underrepresented.

How can the greatest countries on earth not see this coming? How come we weren’t better prepared?

Years ago I tried to give away WHO-based pandemic preparedness plans to businesses. They said it wasn’t a priority. In early March of 2020, many organizations around the world panicked. They didn’t know what to do.

Setting the Stage

There will be a lot of analysis and finger pointing. The findings will be many and complicated.

I’ll share why I believe the pandemic quickly became unmanageable. However, I will exclude the failure of political leaders and keep this article focused on businesses and project management.

Assumptions

• We knew a pandemic the size of COVID-19 could be possible as it has happened in the history of our civilization.

• We know how to execute planned procedures. Given a guidebook, a procedure, and some good training, we can accomplish almost anything.

Let’s assume a pandemic preparedness procedure with action steps is a “project” ready to be executed. Let’s call that a “recipe”, which is like a project template. The execution of this recipe would require project management methods and actions where a project lead would assemble a team, choose the best method for the project needs, schedule due dates, oversee execution, follow up, etc.

Now let’s take a look at three COVID-19 failures and what they can teach project managers.

Failure #1 — No ready-to-use recipes

Business and healthcare organizations didn’t have ready-to-execute recipes on how to prepare and manage pandemic preparedness. Their newly created COVID-19-reaction teams didn’t know what to do other than to figure it on the fly. This kind of hacking under stress is begging for trouble.

As I have written in a past blog post, businesses and healthcare facilities are constantly failing from not having the right frameworks with how-to action steps, especially from lessons learned. Today, organizations are faced with constant change from competition pressures, business innovation, and shifting consumer behavior. Just like COVID-19, we cannot predict when major factors will hit us, but we do know it will indeed happen.

Today, many organizations are still not documenting what they did over the last 12 months to be prepared for a future pandemic. Instead they are prioritizing on opening up their business. As ramp-up business gets crazy busy, will they ever take a look back and establish a blueprint of recipes for future preparedness? Will they remember the details?

LESSON #1 — Use recipes, Really

The COVID-19 failures has taught us the importance of establishing crisis-ready frameworks in advance. You know how critical it is to be prepared. Build process recipes for both critical needs and normal business-as-usual projects.

Learning to set up and execute repeatable process and project recipes will not only bring about better project end results from lessons learned, but will also get your teams into a good habit of thinking recipe-to-project execution. This mindset will help you establish more and more recipes, building a library of flexible options. As your recipe library builds, it will become easier to expand frameworks to include disaster preparedness.

Failure #2 — If Recipes are NOt Easily Executable, you’re Still in Trouble

Our government’s COVID-19 preparedness guidelines from the CDC were well documented, but not easily executable. They were not designed to be used as a project execution tool that would allow for accountability and progress status.

Some organizations have operating procedures and how-to knowledge content that are document, but are not designed for implementation. It’s one thing to have procedures files stored on the server or in the cloud. It’s another thing to turn those processes into action so you can assign due dates, assigned people, get work done, solve problems, and follow up with progress.

Lesson #2 — Turn Recipes into Execution

Recipes are meaningless if they cannot be well executed as projects. Tools and trained people must be in place to turn recipes into action.

The CDC execution failure teaches us that your organization should have platforms or applications in place that are specifically designed to contain recipes with all of the how-to knowledge, execute those recipes as projects, and provide reporting needed for followup and decision making. There are many tool options in the market. An example technology is the Pie project and process web application. You can see a sample of pre-made recipes for pandemic preparedness and other project processes in the Pie Store, which can be imported executed for free in the Pie tool.

Combining ready-to-use recipes with execution tools will make it so much easier to implement daily projects for improved results. It will also better prepare you to handle the big crisis when it happens since your teams will already know how to think creatively about using pre-defined methods with execution tools.

Failure #3 — Too busy to turn lessons learned into better Recipes for the future

Both businesses and healthcare facilities have shown little organized effort to turn what they have learned into improvements and easy execution for next time.

As organizations are quick to shift to post pandemic growth operations. Reflecting on what went wrong, what went right, and then making process improvements for a future crisis is not top of mind. Part of this failure is that they haven’t incorporated recipes and process improvement into their project culture. What’s going to happen with a future pandemic when many of the staff members who hacked COVID-19 changes are no longer around? Knowledge can easily walk out the door.

Lesson #3 — IMPROVE Continuously for a PREPARED future

Do you make time for lessons learned during all of your project implementations? Probably not unless you have built process improvement into your culture as a business-as-usual activity.

Start with what you learned from the above two failures with building recipes and using tools to execute them. Add to your recipes specific action steps at different phases that instruct your team to pause, reflect, and document lessons learned from issues, risks, and new innovative ideas during that project phase. Immediately update the project’s recipe with better task content from the lessons learned. Keeping your recipes fresh, will indeed better prepare you for that next new project and also for that next future pandemic or other crisis.

On a side note, when looking for better project tools, be sure to find one that is designed for real-time process improvement.

Imagine…

We failed with COVID-19 preparedness. We now know what we need to do better for the next time. So let’s imagine new approaches.

• Imagine your organization has ready-to-execute recipes for daily project operations. Image you have frameworks for a future pandemic crisis (or climate change crisis?).

• Imagine your organization has the right technology to contain and implement those recipes.

• Imagine your organization has ongoing exercises that turns lessons learned into better knowledge for the future.

Now, let’s stop imagining and let’s get it done.

Written by: Paul Dandurand, Pie CEO & Founder
Banner image by: United Nations COVID-19 Response