Comments on: The Truth About Lessons Learned

By: Kareem

Kareem — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:18:00 +0000

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…

By: Raghavendra Kulkarni

Raghavendra Kulkarni — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:47:26 +0000

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

By: PM Hut

PM Hut — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:57:43 +0000

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.

By: Mahmoud Adel

Mahmoud Adel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:30:41 +0000

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

By: Kareem

Kareem — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:00:09 +0000

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

By: Ron Rosenhead

Ron Rosenhead — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 20:46:38 +0000

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

By: Ahmed A. Korany

Ahmed A. Korany — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:34:42 +0000

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.

By: Ryan Endres

Ryan Endres — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:09:24 +0000

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