Written by: Vidya Murugan, Arcadis
Lessons Learned is an industry best practice that promotes the sharing of knowledge and understanding gained through experience. One way to avoid repeating mistakes is to look back at what led to these results and decide what can be done differently to have a more successful project delivery. Similarly, successes can be replicated by carefully analyzing what was done to handle challenging situations or avoid undesirable outcomes.
Large institutions often have a wealth of knowledge but lack the means and process to share it. Knowledge losses translate into real losses in project metrics as mistakes get repeated and opportunities are not realized. The goal of Lessons Learned is to provide future project teams with information that can increase their effectiveness, and to build on the experience that has been earned by each completed project.
Recognizing Lessons
Having acknowledged the value of this exercise, the next step is to recognize what qualifies as a lesson. For an experience to qualify as a lesson, the information captured must meet three important criteria:
- It should be factually and technically correct.
- It should have had a significant impact on a project metric, like time or cost.
- It should be applicable to future projects.
Capturing Lessons
Lessons are learned throughout the project’s life cycle. It follows that lessons can therefore be captured at any point during the project’s lifecycle. It is a good practice to keep notes of project experiences as they happen and record the lessons periodically before the team moves on and forgets the fine details of the issue. This is particularly true for projects with long durations.
One way to capture lessons is through a workshop. Key project staff are invited to participate in a workshop where they are encouraged to share their experiences and make recommendations. These workshops should be facilitated by a neutral third party to remove biases. Since the lessons learned is a look back, the end point is a very good place to start. How did the project perform on project metrics? What led to this? What was learned on the way? Project teams should identify as much information as possible about the challenge or opportunity identified. They should be honest and impartial. They should describe how the challenge or opportunity affected project metrics and make efforts to quantify the impact. Finally, they should identify what was done to respond to the challenge or opportunity, what could have been done differently to change the outcome, or what steps should be taken to replicate the success.
It is important to keep in mind that Lessons Learned is not a forum to point fingers or hand out gold stars. It is a platform for knowledge sharing. Personal attacks should be avoided. All discussions should be neutral and fair. Lessons should not be so specific that they are not relevant to new projects, or so generic that they are meaningless.
Using Lessons
In addition to capturing lessons, all project team members should use lessons learned to maximize the benefit to their current project and ensure adherence to best practices. It is important to set up a knowledge base or portal where lessons captured are stored and can be easily accessed by project teams. Project teams should make it a practice to review lessons learned on similar projects in the past, to identify potential issues, solutions and opportunities. This will facilitate better project planning and program implementation. Organizations should look to Lessons Learned to track institutional knowledge. If the same issue keeps cropping up, or a group of issues with similar resolutions crop up over time, it would be in the organization’s interest to look at developing a solution. Recommendations made by teams in the Lessons Learned exercise can be mined to develop best practices.
Key Benefits of adopting Lessons Learned
The goal of Lessons Learned is to build upon the successes and lessons of prior teams, to reflect on what is working, and to identify where changes could improve the team's work and the overall project. The key benefits of this exercise are that it
- Provides a formalized way to track institutional knowledge
- Strengthens organizational potential to learn from past experiences
- Improves program implementation
- Informs development of best practices
Conclusion
Lessons Learned is a tool to improve our future performance. Project teams should make it a practice to keep notes of Lessons Learned throughout the project life cycle. This will aid knowledge transfer and make contributions to the Lessons Learned effort more efficient. A defined process or tool should be put in place to capture and apply Lessons Learned. The true value of this effort lies in the implementation of the recommendations made by prior teams. Lessons Learned is not about digging up skeletons or putting a project team on trial; rather, it is a means to identify the root cause of performance, both bad and good, learn from collective experiences, and grow stronger together.
Case Study: Need for Lessons Learned
This organization (Agency) is a bi-state transportation agency that conceives, builds, operates, and maintains infrastructure critical to the region's trade and transportation network. The projects undertaken by this agency tend to be repetitive in nature, lending themselves beautifully to a lessons learned effort. Over the years the Agency has amassed a wealth of institutional knowledge but had no formal way to transmit it. The Agency decided to put in place a formal structure to track institutional knowledge and learn from it.
The Process and Timelines
The Lessons Learned process is an Agency-wide effort initiated by the Agency’s top brass. It is owned by a neutral third party: The Project Management Office (PMO). The process involves an online database application that includes a questionnaire and electronic workflows. It has three distinct phases: pre-workshop, workshop, and post-workshop.
In the pre-workshop phase the PMO reaches out to project managers, inviting them and their teams to participate in this process.
Project Managers identify and select all the relevant team members who were involved in this project, and who would be able to contribute to a discussion on “learnings from this project”. They set up a workshop at a date and location that is convenient for the team. Normally a 2-week window is allowed for data gathering and preparation. Once the project manager has scheduled the workshop, the PMO sets the online application to send out a questionnaire to all the above team members so that they can put down their thoughts on key learnings from the project’s challenges and successes. This questionnaire is an online form. It is very straightforward and does not take more than 10 to 20 minutes to complete. The participants have approximately two (2) weeks to complete their responses. These questionnaire responses are anonymized and used as a base to guide and facilitate the workshop discussion.
The next step is the workshop itself. The PMO facilitates Lessons Learned workshops focusing on how to improve project delivery. Participants are encouraged to put forth their points of view and talk about their experiences and learnings. The discussions are logged by the facilitator.
Post-workshop, the facilitator uses the discussion logs to prepare draft lessons. These drafts are circulated to all the workshop attendees to review and comment. Once the week-long review period is over, the final lessons are published on the Lessons Learned application for the benefit of everyone in the Agency.
The process takes around a month from end to end, but the lessons captured last a lifetime.
Participation
All stakeholders with knowledge relevant to the project are invited to participate. The PMO works with the project manager and project team to ensure that all relevant parties are invited to complete the questionnaire and attend the workshop.
Key stakeholders are generally drawn from:
- Core project team
- End user
- Internal and external consultants
- Issue-based participants
Report
The final report is published in the form of individual lessons. Each lesson includes a brief background, detailing the experience, a statement of the success or challenge, the impact of the issue, the lesson learned and recommendations to future teams. Only agreed and verified information makes it to the report. While writing the report, the PMO takes care to standardize language and to keep the report impartial. Lessons published are not so specific that they are not relevant to new projects, nor so generic that they are meaningless.
Results
While the Agency’s Lessons Learned process is still in the preliminary stage, the results are extremely encouraging. In the space of a year, the Agency has conducted more than 30 Lessons Learned workshops and created a user-populated database of more than 122 lessons, searchable by project type or key word. Moreover, the accretion of lessons on key topics suggests paths for changes in the Agency’s procedures and practices that could lead to better project outcomes. Thus, the Lessons Learned program has become a tool for the Agency’s approach to knowledge management and continuous improvement.
Written by: Vidya Murugan, Project Controls and Management Consultant, Arcadis
She can be reached by email at Vidya.Murugan@arcadis.com