Tips from PMs: How to Share Lessons Learned for Project Improvement

Does your organization document and share its lessons learned throughout the project management process? This question was recently discussed among a highly engaged group of project managers through the Project Management Networking Group.

Information sharing is a proven essential step for improving the project management process – emphasizing the need to not only to discuss and share lessons learned, but to document valuable insight for future reference. (The PMI discussed a similar issue last year.)

According to Bill Gutches, author and producer at Opinions Are Free, “Insanity is defined as repeating the same things over and over again and expecting different results!” This post is intended to help PMs avoid such scenarios.

The PMI also posted a similar topic last year, and documented insights about collecting and implementing lessons learned to improve the project management process.

Voices on Project Management

Below is the collective insight from the community about how to most efficiently share PM lessons learned, including whether or not this is a good idea and use of resources across the organization:

• Conduct monthly PM meetings, allowing opportunities to share lessons learned for PMs across the company, department or office. The response will generally be positive and will most always generate discussion. Sharing is only part of the process…you must get your PMs to refer to lessons learned early and throughout projects.

Jo Musto, project manager at Stryker

• Organizations must “institutionalize” the lesson. Once a lesson is identified, assign a champion to make it become an organizational lesson learned.
  

William Pirkey, T Project Manager & Software Engineering Manager

• Implement and continue to revise in order to maintain the learning. What happened after implementation? Did something new crop up? Some organizations may have an intranet or document records space where this can be recorded. Or it might be simple enough to start a wiki to record all these lessons. This will allow different team members to share their experiences. The key to learning is to share, implement and then keep practicing!

Shubangi Paheerathan, Customized training in project management, written & verbal communication

• Lessons learned must be documented at the end of each project life-cycle phase, must be stored in a way that facilitates retrieval (NOT stored by project name) and there must be a mechanism in place that requires PMs to consult past lessons and penalties/disincentives for failing to apply lessons learned.

Bill Duncan, IPMA-B Assessor

• Retrospectives on the process must be done at the end of each iteration, not just at the end of the project. The entire team is involved and participates in a (15 to 30 minutes) well facilitated retrospective, while the team picks up changes they can commit for the next period of work (1 -4 weeks on what you have picked as your cycle time).

Bachan Anand, Believer, Agile Coach

• People should be commended for bringing things to the attention of others that we should avoid doing, and promoting best practices. The worst crime is to cover things up that you would rather others not know and damage the organization’s development as a result.

Derek Bell, PMP (APM & PMI) PRINCE2 Practitioner

• “If you do not learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.” In order for a group of people to get better at a repeating or similar sets of tasks, they MUST review what worked and what didn’t as often as possible AND use the results of these reviews to change what they plan to do next. Here is another useful quote: “Insanity is defined as repeating the same things over and over again and expecting different results!”.

Bill Gutches, Author and Producer at Opinions Are Free