What is the frequency of lessons learned?

There should be provisions for "Lessons Learned" from the onset of the project and having a standardized reporting frequency is nice. It doesn't matter how often or when, as long as everyone is in agreement, know what and where it is. However, should something come up that should be shared with the teams, we should be flexible and not be gung-ho about our established protocols. For every rule, there is always an exception.

There are two issues here - one is how often you should identify and log the lessons, and the other is how often you should publish them to the rest of the organisation.

You should identify lessons at any time, through processes such as After Action review for example, and log them in a project lesson log. Then at defined points you review whats in the log (plus any other higher level lessons), select the lessons that are a) high impact and b) transferable, and publish them. Don't publish them all, as probably 80% are not transferable, or trivial.

The defined points for publishing usually depend on the scale of the project. Small projects, review and publish at the end (and its often only towards the end that you realise the full impact of some of the lessons). Large projects, do it at the stage gates or milestones. As Henry says, the PMO or Head of Projects will define what's expected.

In my projects, we used a simply format, reviewed at each weekly team meeting. That format was: Task, Completion date, Impacts, Lessons Learned.

We wanted to know the impacts for dependencies what they could expect. In terms of lessons learned, we also expected positive and negative lessons learned, and followup comments later, should the lesson learned need to be revised or a solution noted, but determined through later work.

hi,

I'd say that from a Project Execution perspective, it's better to document the best practices and lessorn learnt as soon as they are identified, when we all have it clear in our minds what has happened and how we addressed it.

As some other mentioned before, at project closure activities all LL and BP should be added into the registry and also the PMO should have an updated version (even while the project is still alive and registering them) so that they can be shared with other projects and help transferring the knowledge identified.

Hope this helps.
Griselda

I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions. In the construction Industry also we used to capture the LL in some critical moments , not in any fixed frequency as such.