Project Management

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How do you turn lessons learned into real organizational change?

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SANTOSH BADGUJAR CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER| Accumax Lab Devices Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India
True organizational change happens when lessons learned aren't just recorded, but integrated. We need to move them out of closing reports and directly into updated standard operating procedures, training modules, and active checklists so the organization evolves automatically.
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Kimberly Whitby
PMI Team Member
Online Community Specialist| PMI Newtown Square, Pa, United States
I encourage other community members to share their comments.
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Robert Snyder Founder & President| Innovation Elegance, LLC Chicago, Il, United States

The first step for the integration I think you want is to greatly simplify your culture and project plans.

The metaphors to simplify your culture include "agreement flywheel," "expectation factory," and "decision symphony."

Many project plans contain "Infinite Activity." Instead, build a project plan that contains strictly your "Finite Productivity."

Teams have infinite decisions to make, but when teams "bundle" their decisions, teams can land on a finite number of "Decision Bundles." My default is 54 bundles. Separately, I can share what these are, but experienced project managers are already familiar with many of these (under the umbrellas of people, process, and technology).

Organize your Decision Bundles into a schedule / project plan that reflect interdependencies. For every Decision Bundle, create four rows. 1) Draft. 2) Review & Revise. 3) Approve. 4) Distribute. Assign names to each row (just like you would a RACI matrix). Add duration estimates. Default to 1 day for each row. If someone asks to reserve more than 1 day for their assignment, no problem.

I'll jump to what happens in the Lessons Learned. You only have 5 places to reflect Lessons Learned.

Decision Bundle count and names (e.g. increasing or decreasing from 54)

Decision Bundle contents / insides

Interdependencies of the bundle (sequential / parallel)

Assignments among Five Verbs (Draft, Review, Revise, Approve, Distribute)

Duration

That's it. Don't manage anything else because it's inconsequential work not worth managing. Fair? I welcome reactions, questions, ideas, etc.

Back to the concept of Finite Producitivity ... 54 x 4 = 216. That is my default "Finite Productivity." A mature team knows its metric, and knows that every Lessons Learned stands to fine-tune this metric.
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Lissette Indhira Pimentel Sosa
Community Champion
Program Manager| HARPER SRL Santo Domingo / Distrito Nacional, Dominican Republic
Lessons learned only create value when they lead to action. If a lesson is repeated across projects, it's a good sign that a process, template, or checklist needs to be updated.

That way, the improvement becomes part of how future projects are delivered instead of remaining in a report that no one revisits.
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Robert Snyder Founder & President| Innovation Elegance, LLC Chicago, Il, United States
Zooming out, Santosh, what culture do you want to evolve? For example ...

You might want to increase volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
You might want to decrease volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

It's possible that neither of these resonate, but you have something else in mind.

Could you share examples of what you mean by "real organizational change?"
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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States
How do you turn lessons learned into real organizational change?

You first have to capture and identify lessons learned that have organizational impact. Most lessons learned focus on the project. If you're only identifying project-level lessons, your lessons learned will never lead to organizational change.

An important question to ask is "Should they?" Should project lessons learned be expected to lead to organizational change? Most of the time the answer is no. I'm not saying to ignore organizational issues, but most lessons learned are at the project level. Organizational issues that affected the project should not be ignored during lessons learned discovery and should be escalated appropriately, but the decision to act upon the organizational issue does not occur at the project level. So, the second thing you need is a function that takes the organizational issues and determines what to do about them, if anything.
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Luis Branco CEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, Ldª Carcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
An excellent point.
Updating procedures, training, and checklists is an important step, but it may not be sufficient on its own.
Organizational learning is more likely when those changes are consistently adopted in practice, reinforced through everyday decisions, and refined through experience.
Perhaps the real challenge is not only capturing lessons, but creating the conditions that allow new practices to be adopted, reinforced, and sustained over time.

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