All – A couple posts regarding organization\'s lessons learned! My informal revi
ID: 424766 • Letter: A
Question
All – A couple posts regarding organization's lessons learned! My informal review of your responses indicates that lessons learned are a wonderful thing – we documented all our coulda, shoulda, wouldas, right? Except, do we really ever do anything with lessons learned? Some have suggested that we use contract closeout to "improve the quality and/or process for future contracts. How do we do that? Hard to call them lessons learned if nothing changes. Do our organizations need a lesson in learning lessons learned? Thought?
Explanation / Answer
The purpose of the lessons learned document remains to capture the project’s lessons learned in a formal document for use by other project managers on similar future projects. These may be used as part of new project planning for similar projects in order to determine what problems occurred and how those problems were handled and may be avoided in the future. Additionally, these document details what went well with the project and why, so that other project managers may capitalize on these actions. Project managers may also use this document to determine who the project team members were in order to solicit feedback for planning their projects in the future.
This document should be formally communicated within the organization and should become a part of the organizational assets and archives. These archives should be available to everyone in organization and should be formally managed and communcated to team to create knowledge distribution. Keeping them only in files reduces the learning process as people never take effort to dig them out if they are not aware they even they are available