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The Maverick's guide to Strategic Portfolio Management
March 20, 2025 | Live Webinar
I taught a webinar on lessons learned recently and while I was researching it I found loads of good tips. I drew from my own experience, that of other people and published research, and I thought it might be worth sharing a few of the tips here.
Be considerate of hierarchical power in the room and split the sessions by delegates if necessary. In my experience, more junior colleagues don’t share the things that didn’t work so well, or point out successes that they were a part of if there are senior managers in the room.
This is going to depend on your organisational culture – maybe everyone is happy sharing. But I remember a workshop (not a lessons learned) where someone who did the job we were talking about shared a point about the detail and the project sponsor (who hadn’t done the job for many years, if he ever had done it at all) said, “No, it doesn’t work like that.” And consequently shut the conversation down. It’s hard to challenge leadership so split the sessions if you need to, if you think it will help you get more honest feedback.
Write up the output and share it promptly. Lessons are already ‘old’ by the time you are talking about them because they’ve happened and you’re reflecting on them. Write up what you need to write up and circulate the actions as soon as you can.
If there are too many actions, prioritize them and focus on the ones that will add most value. Lessons learned meetings can come up with loads of actions, and if you are doing the exercise mid-project, it’s likely you’ll have actual project work to focus on instead of setting up a whole new project just to fix the things you’ve identified.
Delegate actions to other people, or if you can’t do that, just pick a couple of the major points to work on during the next few months. Come back to the rest of the list later.
Avoid scheduling near holiday times. If you need key people to be in the room, make sure they are around. That might mean scheduling the lessons learned conversations now, even if you are mid-way through the project, or a few months in advance so they hold the time in their calendars.
Ask each individual/team to come with their top 3 lessons. Save time in the session itself by getting people to put in some up-front work. Invite them to come along with their top 3 lessons already prepared, either by sending out a survey or question prompts or letting them have free rein.
Be assured that some people won’t have done this pre-work by the time they arrive in your meeting, so you might want to allocate the first 5 minutes of the meeting to silent individual brainstorming. Then everyone can use the meeting time to come up with the things they feel are the most important.
Collate outcomes in groups/categories to better manage them. The suggestions and lessons are going to fall into various categories, especially if you have given the attendees prompts to think about.
If you’re meeting in person, have separate flip charts or when you are picking up sticky notes from attendees, group them together in common themes as you stick them up. It’s so much easier with an electronic whiteboard, where you can ask participants to drag and drop the stickies, or you can do it as they appear on the screen.
Hope these tips help! When’s your next lessons learned session? Let me know that you’ve got one booked in the comments!
Posted on: July 02, 2024 09:00 AM |
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