Ah, the Lessons Learned Register, that most noble of project management artefacts. It selflessly exists not to make your project better (though it may) but to help those who come after strengthen their projects, avoid the pitfalls you discovered the hard way, and keep your successors on the righteous path of clear scope, cost, quality, and timescale.
Of course, people don’t actually read them, so they’re kind of wasted.
Don’t worry, though, we can learn lessons from that.
Work on your timing. The Lessons Learned Register isn’t something to be filled in at the end of the project, or certainly not only then. It’s to be filled in when you, uh, learn a lesson. The clue really is in the name. This can be at any point in the project – discovered that your procurement platform won’t read RTF documents? Make a note so you don’t send the wrong format again. Found out that you are delayed because your project sponsor only works one week a month? Make a note that you should ensure that is checked before a new project.
You get the picture. Some of the lessons will help you during the project, some only help for the next project. Ideally, you’d be able to remember the ones that help you within the project, but hey, we’re all busy, and there may be quite a gap of time between incidents.
But that in project help is the bonus, rather than the point. The Lessons Learned Register is going to be part of your organisational memory, helping you, or another project manager, see the potential obstacles coming up during the next project. That’s why we do spend time on the Lessons Learned Register and a Lessons Learned Report at the end of a project – we can highlight the lessons we think were important, especially if they are generally applicable.
Of course, like I said, it’s likely no-one who needs to will read it – they are organisational memory, but your organisation has amnesia.
There are some ways to fight this. First of all, if it is an in-project transition of project manager, make sure there is an overlap, so the incoming project manager can talk to the outgoing project manager – that’s how the best knowledge transfer works. More broadly, there is a benefit in having a regular meeting for all an organisation’s project managers so they can share knowledge and experience, and help each other out. Yes, some won’t share, some will feel they don’t need any help, and some will just keep skipping it, but that’s a management issue, not a problem with the concept. Do the same for programme managers too.
Secondly, make sure you are distilling the lessons down to the most useful items. Make sure the Lessons Learned Report doesn’t answer “What were the lessons?” – have it answer “What would you do differently next time?”, “How did you get around the biggest blocker?”, things like that.
Thirdly, let’s try to make those reports useful. It’s all very well having them filed away somewhere, or guarded by a PMO who is too far from the actual projects to know when they lessons are useful. Have the project manager do a presentation to the other project managers at the end of a project – not to stakeholders, not to PMO, not to the users – to their fellow project managers. Warts and all reveal of the problems, the fixes, the ways to avoid issues. Give them a safe place to have this conversation. Oh, and if you are managing that team of project managers, stay out of the meeting. If you were the blocker, better they learn how to manage you, rather than be too polite to bring it up with you in the room.
And finally, let’s try using the new technologies we have. Throw all of your Lessons Learned Reports into an AI chat session. Give it your new project brief, and ask it what are the most relevant lessons you should consider before moving forward. It won’t be perfect, but it may highlight where you need to look.
So, those are some of my lessons learned from lessons learned. What about you? What are your tips?
Trevor Roberts is a programme and project management consultant and the founder of Dull Industries – a consultancy focused on project turnaround, AI implementation, and digital strategy.