Process Knowledge Matters: How to Share the ‘How’ of Projects

Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.

  Estimating   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

You run a lessons learned meeting at the end of your project, don’t you? That session is the forum for sharing organizational knowledge and documenting what you now know about that type of project in your business. You’ll build a repository of useful data that will help with estimating project tasks in the future, and digest issues so that the business as a whole avoids making similar mistakes. Typically this is all stored in some kind of database as the company “memory” about what was done in the past and whether it was a success.

All this is useful to know. Understanding what was done helps you appreciate why decisions were taken and what led to a successful implementation (or otherwise). Without a lessons learned database, I would never have found out that another project rejected the same change to scope that informed my choice about whether or not to do it. And if there had been a lessons learned database I could have tapped on another project, we wouldn’t have made the same mistake numbering records as another project team had the year before.

So lessons learned are good. The trouble is that too many lessons learned focus on the “what” and skip over the “how”.

The importance of “how”
You might think that when we’re all using standard processes and formal methods like A Guide to the …

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