- Spot the Wins & Fix the Flops: Identify what went right and wrong to improve your team's performance on every project.
- Lock in Success: Capture successful processes and repeat them for future wins—make success your standard!
- Share and Improve: Share lessons learned with the team to prevent mistakes and boost collaboration on upcoming projects.
- Download the Checklist & Take Action: Get ScaleTime’s checklist to streamline your project management and start optimizing today!
When handling projects, it is important to note a few things.
- Spotting Wins & Fixing Mistakes: Identify successes and failures, noting the patterns to improve future projects.
- Lock in Wins: Study successful projects and form a reproducible pattern for future works to make success the standard.
- Share and Improve: Share lessons with project teams to improve collaboration.
- Take Action: Download ScaleTime's free project management checklist to improve project delivery and start optimizing today!
When you look back over a project, do you look at the positive side?
Newly formed teams worked well with efficiency. Senior and junior team members collaborate flawlessly. The project was ahead of schedule. Post-project reviews are encouraging.
Or do you focus more on your mistakes?
Members are always on leave. Lapses in communication. The client made last-minute changes. Underestimating project costs. Delayed project timeline.
Mistakes are inherent in projects, but as managers, the task is to scrutinize the challenges at the end of a project as a way to capture lessons learned.
So, what are these lessons learned?
What Are Lessons Learned in Project Management?
These are insights from the outcomes of past projects and management processes. They are a combination of what went wrong and what went exceptionally well, and how the pitfalls are avoided and the successes replicated.
Why Lessons Learned Are Critical for Project Success?
Learning from past mistakes drastically reduces the chances of making the same mistakes, and feedback on exceptional work highlights positive processes to be replicated. Capturing lessons helps the project teams know how they worked, noting key areas to improve upon.
Benefits of Documenting and Sharing Lessons Learned
Without documentation, past lessons do not become actionable. Documenting these lessons turns them into knowledge that can be used to build a standardized framework for replicating success. The document further serves as a repository to add new processes and compound experiences. Sharing these lessons also fosters a learning culture of collaboration and communication, ensuring collective growth.
What are Lessons Learned Meetings?
The Project Management Institute (PMI) talks about lessons learned as documented information on project experiences, covering both positive and negative ones.
When project managers capture lessons learned, chances are that they will not repeat the same mistakes on their next project. What about the excellent feedback given during post-project reviews? Yep, processes leading to that are also evaluated and reviewed for repeating the same positive response on future projects.
By capturing lessons learned, a project manager can also build a critical review to share with other project teams on their work experience with specific key points on how they can improve current projects.
The PMI also states the importance of documentation to ensure the appropriate use of past experiences that have been critically assessed. You’ll be surprised at how you and your team discover information to establish higher productivity, not to mention better organizational alignment for your agency!
Key Steps of an Effective Lessons Learned Process in PM
So now that we know the basics, how do we apply the lessons learned in project management?
Project teams can find a way to learn from project leaders by creating a lessons-learned process. This way, time exists for the team to meet and share ideas. In addition, you can apply the knowledge from past projects to a similar project in future endeavors or new projects led by other project teams.
We know, we know. Project managers ask how the team’s experience was after the project, and it’s normal to hear every project member say, “Everything’s fine.” “Everything went OK.” Begin by including the lessons learned application as early as the project planning phase. Remind the team during meetings to analyze the project, ask questions, and provide answers at every step during the project cycle.
Here are six steps of a sample lessons learned process to help you get started:
1. Identify the problems with your project team
Based on the newly completed project, past mistakes can be discussed with the entire project team, especially while this is still “fresh” in everyone’s minds. Other than the project manager, a selected facilitator may ask to complete a survey, jot down the events that may have been the crucial factor for the issue, or anything that can capture lessons learned through feedback. Start by asking questions about the causes of the problem. What happened? When and how did the issue arise? Where did we go wrong? By doing this, the team members involved in the said situations can help identify the issue’s root.
Identifying areas for improvement can also help distinguish why the project fell short of expectations or what lacked consistency in the execution of the project. It may be due to the same mistakes experienced in previous projects that caused project failure, or it may be new ones. The identified concerns and issues can have different natures and may be client-facing, internal, or both.
2. Identify the successes as well
During the lessons learned sessions, it is also essential to work on the project’s successes with the help of guide questions. What did we do right? What led to that success? How can it be duplicated? These successes are attributed to factors that can be repeated and included in future projects.
For example, if the team experienced commendations for collaborating well with unquestionable team spirit, was it because of the clear communication between members? Is it because their skills complement one another? Maybe because the project manager supports them as a whole and individually? Or it could be all of the above!
Understanding how the wins came about will ultimately help optimize the implementation of project management processes, risk management, project scope, and other aspects to make the team more efficient and productive.
3. Analyze project management lessons learned
After answering the three important questions: What went wrong? What went right? Where do we need to improve?
The next step to knowing the lesson learned is to organize the survey results, categorize them accordingly, and create a report with team members and stakeholders.
Why do you need to combine all these? Here’s why: Analyzing lessons learned in project management allows you to do a project review. The review should highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the project with recommendations. Project managers also document lessons learned to rate the project’s success and client satisfaction and later review everything with the team.
Finally, we can assess how to work on applying project lessons into action plans that answer recommendations in the lessons learned session.
4. Document or create new documents for best practices
When we share lessons learned with the project team, we let them know the survey results, feedback collated, and the lessons learned. When sharing the results, be sure to record team members’ thoughts about lessons learned and encourage them to look at what processes didn’t work this time. By doing this, team members stay motivated to learn how to improve their work in the future.
But let’s not forget to look at what processes in the pipeline did work and the notable ones that didn’t because they can contribute to creating new documents for best practices. These best practices are then integrated into existing processes.
Some solutions to apply to these processes include training personnel, managing strategies, ensuring accountability, regular communication, and re-evaluating programs as needed.
5. Store, update, or create new documents for those processes
The lessons learned template should be archived and stored in a secure place accessible to the project team, other project managers, and external stakeholders. The template can also be kept in project management tools, where the report can be read and easily shared. A centralized drive or cloud storage can be a great option in today’s digital world, preferably open for access within the company’s local network.
What are the benefits of storing the lessons learned documents? First, keeping these reports available and active helps everyone become familiarised with the best practices, new team members can be acquainted with the agency’s project processes, and project managers can dig through these documents and effectively apply them.
6. Retrieve for use on current and future projects
Setting up a keyword search capability will help retrieve the lessons learned reports. Project managers must always refer to these reports before initiating the project planning phase to see if there are some projects and to avoid repeating the mistakes made in previous projects.
We can also look at the best practices involved in implementing a similar project and challenge ourselves to work on improving things. Lastly, aim to discuss these lessons during project kick-off with stakeholders and team members to identify the risks that will be encountered and develop a solution beforehand.
These standard processes shape the structure of the next project, and the template serves as a guide. Other related documents are used to optimize the searchability of each topic in the lessons learned report.
Real-Life Project Management Lessons and Examples
Real-life experiences best illustrate these lessons. Here are some common project challenges and how they were handled with effective processes.
Communication Challenges and Solutions
Example: Feature delay due to miscommunication on a change in client specifications.
Lesson Learned: Implement a centralized communication platform. Establish clear protocols for changes.
Scope Creep and Project Control
Example: Budget deficit due to unapproved features added to a website redesign.
Lesson Learned: All scope changes should require formal review and stakeholder approval.
Risk Management and Crisis Response
Example: Bootcamp delay due to the unexpected withdrawal of a key vendor.
Lesson Learned: Conduct thorough vendor vetting, keeping a second option in mind. Regularly review the risk register.
Team Collaboration and Leadership
Example: The remote coding team is struggling with low morale due to unclear leadership.
Lesson Learned: Define clear leadership roles. Implement regular team sync-ups for boosting morale.
Best Practices for Applying Lessons Learned in Future Projects
Maximizing value starts from integrating discussions as early as the planning phase of the new project. The documented insights are established with roles assigned to implement improvements. Regular reviews and a blame-free learning culture also enable adequate application of lessons learned during a project.
Tools and Techniques for Capturing Lessons Learned
To adequately capture lessons, standardized templates are necessary for consistency. Key methods include facilitated meetings, surveys, and questionnaires. Project management software also has features to implement lessons learned. Knowledge management systems provide centralized repositories.
Overcoming Common Challenges in the Lessons Learned Process
The process of implementing lessons learned at the end of a project can face hurdles like team resistance (fear of blame), lack of time/resources, and poor documentation. To overcome these challenges, create a psychologically safe environment for team members to open up, allocate specific time, ensure comprehensive documentation, and most importantly, translate the lessons to actionable points. Amidst all problems, strong leadership is key to keeping focus on continuous improvement.
Key Takeaways
Learning lessons while handling projects is essential to the development of a successful procedure. We develop effective systems that fit our business by documenting and applying new lessons to subsequent projects. These goals are also achieved by:
- Identifying issues
- Analyzing these issues through systematic procedures
- Documenting and sharing solutions with your team
- Storing lessons in a place accessible for the entire team
- Retrieving and utilizing learned lessons for future projects
With these steps, you can eliminate some of the most common issues in project management through taking advantage of your knowledge on past projects and utilizing your lessons learned.
With ScaleTime’s Agency Project Management Checklist, you can start your way to making your project management life easier and more efficient. Check out our automated processes to eliminate bottlenecks and other project management strategies. Get your checklist today!
FAQ
What Are Lessons Learned in Project Management?
Lessons learned in project management are documented information gathered from positive and negative project experiences. They are valuable insights to improve future projects.
Why Lessons Learned Are Critical for Project Success
Lessons learned are essential because they help organizations to replicate successful strategies, prevent them from repeating past mistakes, and enhance productivity and overall outcomes.
Benefits of Documenting and Sharing Lessons Learned
Documenting and sharing lessons creates room for replication of successful processes. It also helps promote a learning culture, aids in more accurate planning, improves team collaboration, and increases efficiency.
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