Lessons Learned
At the workshop I am attending this weekend the concepts of lessons learned has come up several times. Several times someone in the group has said, "we have the lesson’s learned from the last time we did this, haven’t you reviewed this?" In each case the manager in charge of the project replied, "I didn’t know they were out there." Despite the diligent efforts to capture lessons learned, the organization isn’t benefiting from prior experiences as much as they could.
So when is a lesson learned considered learned? Stopping at the end of a project effort and identifying the things you wish you knew at the start of the project is a very powerful technique. Writing these lessons down for those coming after us is an important way to archive this information. But without a way to make sure that the people who will be responsible for the next project understand the relevant lessons learned, this is not productive time. There are three suggestions for handling this.
1. The people who are taking on projects must take the time to look for and review lessons learned from prior similar projects. This means that lessons learned must be stored where they can be found and tagged so that the relevant lessons can be identified.
2. There could be someone in your organization who is familiar with the lessons learned that are out there and provide some context to new managers.
3. Whenever possible, there should be a meeting with the new manager, a person with prior experience, and a someone who is familiar with the library of lessons learned where a conversation takes place. Even if 1 and 2 are taken care of, people learn much more from hearing stories than from reading a formal document.
Remember, documenting interesting lessons is valuable, but nothing is learned until it is available for someone to use it when it matters.