Learn Your Lessons

John D’Entremont, PMP, is a program manager with over 15 years experience in training, managing training teams and designing materials to enhance the skills of managers and executives.

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   ProjectsAtWork  

Lessons learned play a fundamental role in sustaining project success in your organization — and your career. Here are suggestions for bringing a disciplined approach to the gathering of best practices to follow (and pitfalls to avoid). It's based on a series of questions that address the project lifecycle and process phases.

The concept of collecting lessons learned, in its truest sense, lends itself to the betterment of the organization. If you are not vigilant in your quest to create a better product or process, you run the risk of growing stagnant. Worse, there is a very real possibility that an organizational backslide can occur. One way to mitigate the risks that come with complacency is to put into action a formal regimen for the gathering of best practices and things to avoid in future projects. Here are some suggestions for implementing this process.

Project Life Cycle Phases

A quick way to introduce your project team to the practice of noting lessons learned is to create a plan for doing so at the end of each project life cycle phase.  Examples of this range from scheduling formal team meetings, to simply requesting that people post to a discussion board, wiki, or some other form of media.  Following is a breakdown of the life cycle phases, along with some sample questions that can be asked at each checkpoint.

Initiate— Did we have a firm…

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