Finding the Time to Collect Lessons Learned

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Lessons Learned   Risk Management  

Deadlines are crashing down on the team and the critical path is beginning to look like a nightmare outlined in red. Of course, this is the perfect time for the project manager to declare that the team needs to spend a few days brainstorming about lessons learned, right?

Maybe not, but there are definitely times during the project when you need to really work at finding the time to get the team to document the lessons learned. How do you get the team to invest the time and energy when they have so many other demands?

Make it Easy
The first step is to make capturing lessons learned easy on the team that has worked on the project. This means providing training and an easy-to-use template, something that can be filled out by the team in a short timeframe. The training for the team should focus on the benefits of lessons learned for the team and the organization. Let them know how previous lessons learned documents have helped the current project and show that continuous improvement can be used to help make everyone’s job better and to make the project succeed overall.

The project manager or the project management office should be committed to doing the heavy lifting on documenting the lessons learned so that the project team can provide the input without having to take a great deal of time away from the ongoing work of the project. Lessons learned should be …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.