Making lessons learned stick

Last week I looked at some of the issues with running lessons learned or post-implementation reviews and recommended that these sessions are not left to the end of the project.



It’s an expensive business, taking people out of their implementation or project roles and bringing them together for a session of navel gazing.  Working out where things went wrong is a valuable exercise, but only if the lessons are truly embedded and the changes stick so the same issues don’t come up.  Here are some tips to ensure that you really do learn from your mistakes.

 
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• Don’t wait until the end of the project to review lessons learned.  It will be too late by then to do anything constructive with the feedback.






 
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• Document the output of your lessons learned meeting.  Circulate it to all participants so they have a copy to refer to.






 
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• Make a note in your diary to follow up with the individuals who took away action points, specifically if there were outstanding tasks or things identified immediately that would create improvements in the project.  It’s unlikely that you will come together in the lessons learned format again for some time, so you will have to use other methods to follow up on the actions.  Add any actions from the lessons learned session to your weekly team meeting action log, for example.






 
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• Make another note in your diary for a month’s time, to assess whether the changes identified have really been taken onboard.  Just by writing them down and identifying them during a meeting will not make them happen, as people tend to gravitate to the easiest way of doing things, which is normally the way they have been doing things in the past.






 
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• If you don’t see any changes, you need to turn those improvement suggestions into a proper action plan and build the tasks into the project plan.






 
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• Encourage people to challenge behaviuor when they see something that should have changed as a result of lessons learned.






 
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• Make it difficult for people to do things the old way.  For example, if there is a tendency to store project documents in multiple shared drives, remove access to all except the one that you want them to use.






 
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• Don’t be afraid to make physical changes either.  If you have identified that two people should be working more closely together, swap their desks about to make it easier for them to do so.






 
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Above all, keep referring back to the list of things that needed to be improved.  When you’ve done everything on the list it’s time for another lessons learned meeting!



Oh, and finally:  keep referring back to the list of things that you identified that you were doing well.  Don’t let these slip!  You need to keep on doing the good things as well as improving the areas of weakness.