Where Do Lessons Go to Die?

  Governance   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   ProjectsAtWork  

Although many organizations are adequately capturing lessons learned, they often struggle with learning and reusing them on current projects. A detailed analysis of the lessons-learned programs at three organizations uncovered these nine best practices that can help you and your team share and find all those lost lessons.

For all their popularity, lessons learned programs regularly fail to deliver the intended results. Lessons may be captured, but they are not absorbed or applied even within the same project, much less elsewhere in the organization. In 2009, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) launched a collaborative research study — Cutting the Cost of Not Knowing: Lessons Learned Systems People Really Use — to study this problem and identify the critical success factors for an effective lessons learned approach.

APQC’s hypothesis was that many barriers to success arose from the lessons learned process itself. Some of the study team’s suppositions about the challenges posed by lessons learned included:

> Context — If lessons are captured or documented without the proper context (e.g., description of project, equipment specifications, political environment, scientific data), then the end-user who is looking for lessons to apply to his or her project cannot apply the lessons properly.

> Storage and retrieval …

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