From the course: Project Management Foundations

Document lessons learned

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Document lessons learned

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- [Presenter] On every project, some things go well and other things could go better. Don't let that experience go to waste. By collecting lessons learned, you can repeat your successes and improve on your less than stellar performance. Let's look at ways to coax this info out of your team members. Then you can document those lessons to benefit future projects. First, schedule time regularly for lessons learned. Don't wait until the end of the project to ask about lessons learned. By then, your team members have already forgotten a lot of them. One approach is to add lessons learned as a topic in your status meetings. Keep your lessons learned sessions positive and productive. Start with what went right. Ask each person for a tip or technique that helped them in their work, like what saved you the most time recently? Or what was the gnarliest challenge you solved and how did you do it? Then move on to lessons learned from problems people faced. Remember to keep things positive. For example, what would you do differently next time? Ask people to talk about themselves. That way, they don't fall into blaming others. Give people the opportunity to be open and honest. Try scheduling meetings without managers to see if people will share information more freely. You might use an anonymous method for submitting lessons learned like a suggestion box. This approach can be helpful for sensitive issues or when people are afraid to admit mistakes. Finally, document lessons learned. You can add them to your project notebook, but you can also set up a knowledge base like a webpage with frequently asked questions. That way, everyone in your company can learn what your team already knows. Lessons learned give your organization the opportunity to learn and grow with each new project. Assuming that the hospitals in the consortium share a collaboration system, develop a plan for sharing lessons learned among schedulers and IT teams. You can see my take on this plan in the exercise files.

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