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In this article - a members question gets answered by expert Ken Burrell - “Do you have a template I could review for sending out prior to facilitating a lessons learnt session please?"
In the world of project management, certain areas consistently pose challenges and hinder success. In this dynamic presentation from Tom Quinn at Jacobs, we explore four to five crucial aspects that often cause problems or remain underutilised. Through lessons learnt, we examine how areas such as schedule, risk management, cost, reporting & data management, assurance and change, commonly go astray or fail to deliver desired outcomes.
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According to the poll taken during this session on Lessons Learnt About Lessons Learnt, only 50% of projects in our participant's organisations have a lessons learnt approach as part of their project management delivery methods. Personally, I was surprised at how low that was.
You can't deny that learning lessons from everything we do - in our own lives as well as at work - just makes sense. Taking the time to think about and reflect on how we've done something - whether that's successful or not - should mean we come at a similar or related challenge in the future just that little bit wiser about how we'll tackle it.
Projects and project management are ripe for insights and little nuggets that help smooth the path for future projects - after all, the methods and ways of working in project management have all come from someone's previous lessons on what has worked and what definitely hasn't.
In this PMO Flashmob session about Lessons Learnt, we heard from PMO professional Ken Burrell. Ken is passionate about Lessons Learnt, so much so he wrote a book on it -Learning Lessons from Projects: How it works, why it goes wrong, and how you can do it better - so who better to help PMO professionals understand more about what we can be doing to better support our organisations in this area of Knowledge Management.
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My recent survey asked how transferable Lessons Learned are between projects.
The follow-up (you can see that once you've taken part in the survey) imparted my thoughts and summarised some of the responses I received. Some of the comments didn't quite fit into the survey format, including those from PMO Leader and fellow Flashmobber John McIntyre of Ticketmaster, who said:
I've always found Lessons Learned to be something that is good in theory, but that seldom has any practical application. Attempting to condense the learnings of a project down to a few lines in a lessons log, or (dare I say it) database only serves to sanitise the lesson to the extent that the learning is inevitably lost.
And why for the love of all things holy do we only do lessons reviews at the end of projects? Agile has it right here by advocating regular retrospectives where lessons are picked up and resolved continuously. I agree that the lesson could become dry and distant, and the real-life consequences of "getting it wrong" diluted. So what would be better? Back to John:
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