Lessons Learned is a crucial part of effective project management as it represents the organization’s commitment to project management excellence. Positive as well as negative learnings are collected and communicated at the end of each project. The findings can either be recorded or written down and should then be communicated and made available not only to the project team members, but to everyone in the organization.
Benefits:
Collecting lessons learned at the end of a project is important in order to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Furthermore, best practices can be identified. Those best practices should be shared within the company in order to learn from each other and share individual experiences. This might lead to more competitiveness on the market.
Capturing lessons learned
Lessons learned should not only be identified at the end of the project. It makes sense, to collect positive and negative already after the completion the different milestones. Usually, it is easier to identify pain points as well as what went well directly after a step is completed, rather than weeks or months afterwards. Furthermore, those insights can already be used within the current project and improve the current project work.
It is an ongoing process throughout the whole project.
Purpose of sharing lessons
The purpose of sharing lessons learned is to improve the quality of the projects within a company over time. Mistakes of past projects should be avoided in future projects. On the other side, positive insights should be further used in future projects as well.
Lessons learned process:
At the beginning, lessons learned are captured on a project to project basis, as there might be no process in place. Those project by project assessments usually are not using any standardized tools or formats. Most of the organizations have a meeting where lessons learned are discussed and summarized in a report, which is shared with the project stakeholders.
In order to optimize the lessons learned, it is important, that organizations define processes and basic tools for their lessons learned sessions. The purpose of the process is to define specific activities, which are necessary in order to successfully capture the insights gained from each project step.
A typical process, which is also shown in the figure below, consists of 5 steps:
Identify
Document
Analyze
Store
Retrieve
Identify lessons learned:
Lessons learned are identified by all members preparing for the session as well as the session taking place then. Project members should think about what went right, what went wrong and what needs to be improved as well as recommendations. The project manager is facilitating the session, but.an objective person.
Document:
Reports are created to be presented to different project stakeholders. Different types could be produced, based on different needs of different stakeholders. The reports consist of the data captured during the lessons learned session. The report should also be distributed to all project members. The final report should be stored together with the other project documentation.
Analyze:
The team figures out, what the lessons learned mean and how results can be made applicable for other projects / upcoming projects.
Store:
Lessons learned should be stored together with the other project documentation and should be accessible also for other project teams.
Retrieve:
Retrieve the information gathered in the past to use the insights for current projects. But the reports need to be stored with key words, in order to find something relevant for the current project.
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