The purpose of lessons learned is to gather together any insights to use on future projects, to effectively eradicate poor practices and create a platform to integrate better practices. This can be massively beneficial to a business when used to improve operational processes.
The warning signs
There are many reasons a project can have failed, but learning from it can be a great lesson to ensure strength for future projects. Tracking is important, as this can help you to recognize issues before they become a disaster.
- If a project is running over budget by around 30%, this is not a good sign, and can be hard to correct further on down the lifecycle.
- The customer has contacted the CEO for various reasons and critical points within the project.
- The customer is talking about pulling funding from the agreement. Putting projects on hold often isn’t the best solution, as you will have wasted funding during this time if the customer decided to pull out.
Documenting Lessons Learned
Documenting lessons learned is one of the biggest responsibilities a Project Manager has during or after a project. The ability to learn and keep improving future projects is vital for better success rates. Improvement isn’t just for the business environment; it can be used in any area of life in general, and is a state of mind for someone interested in the holistic side to life.
Lessons Learned should not just focus on mistakes but also praise the successes on a project.
The best time to capture these is in real time, just as they’ve happened. This avoids forgetting about them and knowledge being lost. An Agile Scrum environment can be beneficial for stand-up meetings, which include the Lessons Learned theme. Stand-ups are intended to be focused on the main issues and solutions on projects running at that time. Logging lessons learned after these, can be a great way to log details before they’re forgotten. Then opening up the question to the rest of the project team after, to gain further insights from other areas of the project.
Lessons Learned logs should then be clearly published for all team members and business members to access.
How this can improve project processes
Lessons learned are key to project deliverables, budgets, and customer complete satisfaction. There is a financial saving to be made in organizations, from not repeating mistakes. It could therefore be beneficial to businesses to incorporate Lessons Learned as a permanent and evolving tool within operational procedures.
Recording problems and solutions within an accessible database, categorizing key attributes for ease of search-ability, communicate to all projects teams when this information is updated, encourage use of database through free and informal access to the pool of knowledge, regularly review the data, and continually improve processes to eradicate the problems from reoccurring and implement the successful practices.
However you decide to approach and implement Lessons Learned, they provide a great way to save projects and provide real-time proof of required improvements for business processes, which could be massively cost-beneficial for a business.
To get you started, a free Lessons Learned template:
Helen Barnshaw
Project Manager & Business Analyst
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