Why Do the Same Project Issues Keep Coming Back?

Change Management Lessons Learned Risk Management

Bruce Buryo

Community Champion

In many projects, we document lessons learned, close issues, and move forward with the assumption that the problem has been addressed. Yet in practice, some of these same issues quietly resurface across different projects, sometimes in slightly different forms, but with the same underlying impact.

It raises an interesting reflection: are we truly resolving problems, or just closing them at the surface level?

From your experience, what is one issue that keeps recurring across projects despite being “resolved” multiple times, and what finally helped you break that cycle, if anything did?

Posted: May 5, 2026 2:23 AM

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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal

A familiar pattern.
What you are describing is not a failure of execution, but a failure of decision and learning architecture.

In many organizations, “lessons learned” become documentation artifacts, not decision shifts.
The issue is recorded, sometimes analyzed, but rarely translated into changes in how decisions are made under pressure.
The system remembers, but it does not evolve.

One recurring issue I consistently see is late stakeholder misalignment.
It gets “resolved” through escalation or workshops, yet it returns.

Not because people forget, but because the decision conditions remain unchanged:

No clear ownership of integration
Incentives that reward local optimization over system coherence
No structured space to surface trade-offs early

What breaks the cycle is not better documentation, but redesigning the decision environment:

Forcing early exposure of assumptions and trade-offs
Assigning explicit accountability for integration, not just alignment
Creating governance moments where divergence is enabled before convergence

At the core, recurring issues are not memory problems.

They are decision problems.

If the way we decide does not change, the outcome will not either.

Posted: May 5, 2026 2:55 AM

Abolfazl Yousefi Darestani Manager, Quality and Continuous Improvement| Hörmann-TNR Industrial Doors Newmarket, Ontario, Canada

In most cases, the root cause analysis has not been completed thoroughly. Additionally, the same issue can arise from different underlying causes, and only one or two of these may have been addressed in this or previous projects.

Posted: May 6, 2026 7:19 AM

Sergio Luis Conte Helping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based Organizations Buenos Aires, Argentina

Entropy. The reason because human being are in this world.

Posted: May 10, 2026 10:16 AM

Imran Afzal Author| The Strategic PMO Cary, NC, United States

Hi Bruce. I posed a similar question back in April. I wanted to share the link here, because it had some good responses.

https://www.projectmanagement.com/discussi...ep-coming-back-

Posted: May 10, 2026 9:50 PM

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Why Do the Same Project Issues Keep Coming Back?

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