I think it depends on the culture, as a Latin American, I have seen people like others to share their lesson learned by telling their experience, and it is almost sure than other project managers are going to ask again when they need the information.
What do you think? Is it useful to write them down? Saving Changes...
Lessons Learned should be recorded and shared. Doesn't mind if is an excel file, word or whatever, and you have SharePoint or portal. Saving Changes...
ZHOU WEIBINBeijing, China, [ Choose One ], Hong Kong
I think take a record is the start, and I'd like to organize a "case study" in the regularly project meetings. Saving Changes...
NOHELY COLINALider de Proyecto| PETROPIARLecheria, Anzoategui, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)
I strongly recommend write down and share through Collaborative tools that support knowledge management which prevents the organizational knowledge will lost Saving Changes...
I agree. Lessons Learned should be captured and then shared throughout the organization for future projects to benefit. As mentioned, collaborative tools such as SharePoint or Confluence could be used or Google Drive. Saving Changes...
Catalina:
Yes, this is a current trend. Lessons learned are a past experience, usually put on a shelf to gather dust and stuck somewhere in a database no one uses.
In a sarcastic note you need to do the lessons learned!
They need to be put in writing. It would be best if some structure and keyword are defined.
Publish on a shared platform/portal/web, with keywords so that they are searchable. Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
This is where Knowledge Management comes into play. Writing them down is better than nothing, but to add value to the organization, there needs to be some sense of digital organization of these assets, available to the organization; searchability, findability, readability, consistent - these can be consumed through a portal of some sort, be it SharePoint, or a full fledged Knowledge base. Saving Changes...
ASHISH AGGARWALPROJECT MANAGER| PETROFAC UAECherrybrook, New South Wales, Australia
First of all, Lesson Learnt shall not only mean "Learning from failures'. This shall also be an opportunity to celebrate your successes on the project and share these best practices with others.
Whilst all the lessons have to be recorded in a data base that is searchable, the major problem is that there is generally hundreds of Lesson Learnt and you sometimes feel like finding needle in a haystack. It is always good to have a moderator for Lesson Learnt data base so that duplicate lessons are eliminated and there is always a root cause identfied. There may be number of lessons around single root cause. So long as you know the root cause, you need not know all the lessons. Saving Changes...
Mike FallonProject Manager/Scrum Master| Homesite InsuranceMalden, Ma, United States
Some best practices for lessons learned: 1) get an unbiased person to conduct the lessons learned and to collect the feedback to share, 2) capture what went well and what didn't go so well, 3) get people to agree on 1-3 things that they want to continue to do right or that they want to be sure to correct in future phases of the project, 4) follow thru so these things are not done again! If you're doing Agile, you got to do your Sprint Retrospectives regularly. These are a core ceremony for Agile delivery. Saving Changes...
Community Champion
