Lessons Learned
Lessons learned are a project management tool for continuous improvement. The lessons learned main goal is to learn from the past. The teams must collect lessons, in retrospective sessions or other types of meetings carried out at the end of a project or phase, and collect the positive and negative aspects of the project. The team must then resume and register that information in the lessons learned register to be available for the next phases or future projects. The team can then complement the work with improvement actions and suggestions to solve the issues and promote positive opportunities.
The lessons learned exercise should be a continuous effort, this will improve team effectiveness and productivity. Another positive aspect of the lessons is that allow the organization to have better and more actual information available for the next projects or phases. And let’s not forget, that the information should be available for everyone, not just for the persons allocated to a specific project.
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Process of Preparing Lessons Learned
There is not just one process to create and update lessons learned. The processes can be something like this:
Identify positive and negative points
It’s always easier to register the negative aspects, but is also important to collect the positive aspects of the project. The team must collect the positive aspects so they can be repeated and stimulated in the future. The team should also collect and analyze the negative aspects to avoid them in the future.
Besides the event, the team should also collect information regarding the cause and the consequences of each experience. It will be much easier to avoid negative experiences and enhance positive experiences if we know what has caused them and what are the consequences.
Team members should feel secure about sharing their experiences. Without that safe environment, the information may not be fully truthful and not fully communicated.
The team should collect lessons throughout the project and not just at the end of a phase or the project. Some lessons can be useful for other teams. Other lessons can be useful for the next phases of the project. For example, imagine that a supplier is taking more time to deliver the products. If this supplier would also supply other projects or other products for your project in future phases you would already know and could take measures to avoid those delays. Is also important to collect lessons learned frequently because the team may forget them or at least some aspects of the experience and the information could not be complete.
Identify improvement actions
The team should also analyze the experience and identify improvement actions. They, then, should focus on actions to enhance the positive experiences and actions to avoid the negative experiences. The team can then use those actions in future projects or phases.
Document Lessons Learned
After the team identified all the positive and negative experiences and analyzed all improvement actions they should register them. They can use the lessons learned log to register the experience and improvements or register the improvements on the improvement log.
Analyze and Prioritize Actions
After identifying improvement actions, if nothing is done, the exercise would be a waste of time. So, the team should prioritize improvement actions. The organization should value the work the team did, so team members can feel motivated and keep improving performance.
Share lessons learned
As we mentioned before, lessons learned can also be important for other teams inside the project or even for other projects. So, the team should share all lessons learned with other project team members and other stakeholders that may benefit from these lessons.
The team can use the progress report to share the lessons learned. However, the team can also develop a specific report to share the lessons learned. This report should contain all the detailed information regarding each lesson learned, like the cause, the event, and the consequence. In some cases, the lessons learned are shared in collaborative systems like wikis or databases. These systems can be more productive because everyone can contribute to sharing the knowledge regarding the lesson learned.
Store lessons learned
The worst thing that could happen, would be that all the work would be a waste of time. Imagine that the time spent collecting, analyzing, and registering the lessons would be lost at the end of the project. That is nothing that we can accept. The organization should have a mechanism to save lessons learned from past projects. This information should be available to everyone that can benefit from her.
Finally, the team should store the lessons in an easy way to be easily found. So, when the team stores the lesson learned, it should include a summary, with the cause, event, effect, and relevance of the lesson learned.