George LewisProgram/Project Manager| DXC Technology CompanyHeredia, Costa Rica
Do you believe that technology companies SHOULD have a specific lessons learned methodology in place?
Yes, it is a must. If a company does not have one, they are NOT in the correct path.
Maybe, it is entirely optional. If a company does not have one, they could use alternative methods.
No, it is NOT a must. It is not a critical factor for current organizations; there are other priorities and lessons learned process could be very expensive. Saving Changes...
From my point of view is a "partial yes", meaning, we need to do lessons learned, post mortem, retrospectives or other names that we would like to use... with the goal to analyze how we did the work and how to improve it next time.
I'm not fan of the "methodology", because the ideal is that we adapt the sessions to our teams communication needs...example, there are team members that are super shy...then sometimes to engage them to participate in the sessions and share their thoughts is easy to do a survey or use sticky notes. Saving Changes...
We have a well defined process to document lessons learned. However, it only occurs in the project close-out phase. For us, projects last 10 years plus, so it is of really no use to document any such lessons as such because during that same period of time, there could easily be hundreds of projects that could have benefited from the lessons learned in "real time". We are still struggling as to how best address this issue and turn lesson learned to actual lessons implemented. I have my own thoughts on how this could be achieved, but unfortunately, at this time I cannot share them. Saving Changes...
