The Truth About Lessons Learned
| Posted in Project Management | Posted on 14-03-2010 | 166 views
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Lessons Learned is one of the hottest topics in project management and business, though we keep talking about this process and how important it is, it is an overlooked area for many projects and if it is not overlooked it is often done with the least attention
In every aspect of life, Lessons Learned is an endless process and project management is no exception, the project manager would be doing a big mistake by keeping lessons learned until the end of the project, many lessons are learned along all the stages of the project and if these lessons are not captured they will be forgotten, organizations lose great inputs by ignoring the lessons learned that can save cost, time, and reputation in future projects, enterprise wide lessons learned registry has to be thoroughly studied before starting a new project, whatever I said so far is great but what happens in the real world may be totally different, the truth is that people may feel threatened if they speak about lessons learned because lessons learned usually are accompanied by mistakes and failure, if a team member logs a lesson learned in the project lessons learned registry it may not be honest enough to reflect the exact situation, the project manager himself may avoid logging specific lessons to avoid blame and potentially punishment!
People may find it easier to hide a big elephant and that is often a precursor to a disaster or big failure, mistakes related to poor estimation and hasty decisions that may jeopardize the entire project are mostly ignored and not logged in the lessons learned registry, it’s ironic that lessons learned are mostly captured in successful projects & ignored in failed ones because people tend to ignore talking about mistakes aka lessons learned.
The culture of the organization highly decides the lessons learned process artifacts, if the organization encourages people to be creative and to come up with new ideas that can save cost and time, it is very likely that people will feel secure and will not think for long time before adding an item in the lessons learned registry, on the contrary, if the company is risk averse and has low tolerance level to mistakes, people will tend to avoid mistakes and refrain from giving suggestions and ideas, and even though they log lessons learned to just comply with project or organization’s rules, they will try to beautify it as much as they can and to avoid pointing fingers at any colleagues and at themselves in the first place, in order to avoid this counter productive situation, the project manager has to nurture a fault tolerant environment and to encourage people to be honest and to tell the truth no matter what without being worried about consequences.
Having said that, I think there is too much suspicion around one of the top best practices in project management, How about your experience, have you ever faced difficulty in getting inputs from people for lessons learned? do you make lessons learned a continuous effort or do you just keep it till project closure? do you do it for the sake of compliance or to enhance the organization and yourself? would be great to share your experience!
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Kareem,
I agree with you that lessons learned is a hot topic. It is the number viewed post on my blog:
http://ryanendres.blogspot.com/2009/03/lesson-learned-questions.html
Lessons learned is a big issue in PM but till now I can’t figure how to utilize this amount of information in the lessons learned db , because there is no a good tools to make such stuff pop up in your face if you faced a similar situation , so the process still depends on the persons and not on the process , if you lost experienced Project Manager you will lost a great deal of lessons learned.
Kareem, I like this comment:
“Lessons Learned is one of the hottest topics in project management and business…”
I’m not sure this is true. I rarely find clients wanting to look at lessons learned logs/reports before starting a project and I even find that clients are still making the same mistakes they were 3 or 4 years before….
I wish it were true!
It does not detract from the fact that we should be encouraging clients to do this really important activity
Ron Rosenhead
Ron,
Absolutely right, clients do not want to consider the lessons learned before they embark on new projects, that’s why many people feel “Deja Vu” with project failure, once I have read one quote that says ” Man is the only animal who does not learn from his mistakes “, I don’t remember the author’s name, I am just wondering how organizations and project managers can plan preventive actions without studying previous lessons learned, maybe preventive actions is another pillar of project management that’s not solid enough!
Thank you
In our Organization lessons learned from projects should be shared discussed for future Projects , but this knowledge shared Across our team or Only Team leaders but not Across the organization , the question is how could you serialize this piece of knowledge and how to make it standard to easily sharing it Across the enterprise
Most lessons learned are like risks, they are documented, but seldom used for any benefit.
The process of capturing and documenting lessons learned should be revamped in order to make future access easier and convenient.
Lessons learnt is indeed a hot topic but I have had a mixed experience in terms of whether the learning was applied in the next project. I have seen that learnings are applied only when the same team which had a lessons learnt discussion on starts another project but it is usually not applied when a different team starts another project. It then ends up as just a compliance and is ultimately archived. As mentioned in one of the comments above, it is very important how an enterprise collects, shares and makes these lessons learnt available for every project.
Regards,
Raghavendra
It looks like that the lessons learned are often captured but only people who experience the problems are the ones who try to avoid the same mistakes in future projects, if someone does a mistake he’ll try to avoid it but doesn’t necessarily convey it to other teams in a proper way, the solution to this issue is simple; the project team led by the project manager has to conduct a lessons learned sharing session after project closure in which all lessons will be shared with other teams and should be kept in a central repository for reference, if the company has a PMO it has to take this responsibility and ensure that the lessons are shared across all the teams…