A More Scientific Approach to Lessons Learned?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Business Intelligence   Lessons Learned   Strategy  

This month’s ProjectManagement.com theme is business intelligence--the possibilities for comedy seem endless as we consider what sometimes appears to be an oxymoron. However, I will try and avoid too much cynicism and look instead at the more pure definition of business intelligence--the idea that we can apply a series of processes, methodologies and tools to some data in order to generate meaningful value-add information that we can then use to improve the business. When I thought about that, there seemed to be one area where we can really deliver some significant improvements--project post-mortems, or lessons learned.

Most organizations carry out this process at the end of their projects, seeking to capture information from project team members and stakeholders on what went well, what could have gone better, etc. The problem is that for many organizations, this is nothing more than subjective commentary that is filed away as soon as it is captured and never sees the light of day again. I’d be willing to bet that well over 80% of organizations see the same key improvement areas identified in their lessons-learned sessions over and over again. (Clearly, there isn’t much learning going on!)

To improve things, I believe that we need to address two specific elements:

1. Capturing consistent data
2. Analyzing that data to generate actionable …

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