Virev PMO Blog

Lessons Learned

We have all seen some sort of challenges, road blocks or different problems during the life of our projects. Mistakes are made, things are overlooked, there will be problems with the server configuration, you may also have unexpected resource constraints or you may have no problems at all (ya right…good luck with that :-)).

I always say that problems are but opportunities in disguise. At this time, I am managing 4 large projects for our client. Two of the critical and most challenging projects just got implemented and currently we are providing post-production support on them. I cannot appreciate the importance of documenting lessons learned any more than at this time.

The only way to learn from the past is to document the present. Lessons learned is a road map to the success of your next project. It will help you not make the same mistakes over again. It will help you improve performance. You should create a input template and distribute it among the stakeholders. It is important to get their input. I find the following to be a good starting point:

1. Identify all challenges, problems, mistakes, improvement opportunities.
2. Determine what needs to be done.
3. Determine how a certain process should be improved?
4. What needs to change?
5. Who should have done what?
6. Ask everyone involved to provide their input by a set target date.
7. Setup a meeting with everyone involved to discuss all the above in real time.
8. Typically its not needed to setup a follow-up call for Lessons learned unless you feel you need to have one.

Your template should include the following:

1. Project overview section
2. Some project statistics such as date implemented, number of bugs identified etc.
3. Document what needs to improve in a task format.
4. Document resolution strategy.
5. Assign ownership
6. Set target completion date for each task.

It is very simple and extremely important to perform this critical step after each project. If you want a template, contact me and I will email it to you. Thank you for reading.

Azam | Virev