Project Lessons Learned - A Reflection

Here's the thing about Lessons Learned: you're not learning them. In our experience, most organisations at best identify them - but is anything actually learned? Is changed behaviour ingrained into the lifeblood of the organisation? We have our doubts.

A few reflections we have on Project Lessons Learned activities:

• Does your organisation have a Lessons Learned repository? If not then how do you hope to record and implement them?
• At project start-up, we suggest you conduct a Lessons Learned scanning exercise using key project parameters, search words etc on any Lessons Learned tools to identify any previous lessons of relevance. You could also interview key stakeholders with history in the organisation, read End of Project reports etc. You can then factor these into your plan from the outset.
• Lessons Learned isn't just an end-of-project activity. We should seek to learn lessons and improve during the project itself, leaving it to the end is a bit late! Add it as an agenda item to your project meeting, or schedule a review exercise at the end of each of each Phase. Agile Projects are typically successful here with their Sprint Retrospectives (but probably weaker on recording lessons - Agile Manifesto and all...)
• Use a structured approach to document, analyse and implement Lessons Learned, and make this standard across all Projects in your organisation
• Share the lessons learned as widely as possible!

See Part 2 of this Article Series where we will outline our suggested Project Lessons Learned Process to help bring this structure to your L.L. activities, and hopefully help keep your future projects on-track. Also check out our Project Lessons Learned Template that is available now! What approaches have you used for Lessons Learned in the past?

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