Application of Text-Mining Methodology for Organizational Learning Analysis

For any company, organizational learning provides continuous identification and improvement of best methods. It also identifies repeated issues/learnings for systemic improvements. For the semiconductor company (company name veiled for the scope of the project) the organizational learnings captured from retrospectives and post-mortem work during the project lifecycle and at the end of the project. Retrospective is basically looking back over things in the past. A retrospective is a methodology that: Is led by a trained facilitator not involved with the program Follows a defined, objective process Occurs multiple times during a project Leads to actionable change for the processes guiding this and other development teams The focus of a retrospective is to increase the capability of your team by: Sharing perspectives to understand what worked well in the project so we can reinforce it Identifying opportunities for improvement & lessons learned so we can improve this & subsequent projects Making specific recommendations for changes Discussing what the team wants to do differently Helping the team see ways to work together more effectively Postmortem is basically an analysis carried out shortly after the conclusion of an event, especially an unsuccessful one. In many companies, a Postmortem is a review meeting held following the shipment (or cancellation) of a project that: Is typically led by the Program Manager or Project Leader Does not always follow a defined, objective process Occurs too late to implement corrections on the project Often does not lead to actionable change for the processes guiding this and other development teams The Action Plans, BKMs and Key Learnings from retrospectives and Postmortems are valuable tools to affect change on the current and future projects thus providing continouous improvement, better communication and improving productivity. All the learnings from the Retrospective and the Postmortem is captured in a high speed database to analyse the learnings/issues/problems faced during the project implementation. This paper discusses text-mining methodologies to investigate the organizational key learnings in a semiconductor company