Creating Learning Lookbacks

If you are reading Remarkable Results for the first time, please subscribe here ? to receive each weekly issue.? If you like what you read, please share it with others and invite them to subscribe.

Projects are likely a part of your working life. And for many, more of their work is project based than ever before. If this is true for you, then finding ways to improve your ability to deliver projects is one of the best things you could be doing. I have a way to make those project improvements far more likely and predictable. I call them Learning Lookbacks.

Have You Been Here?

The project has been long. It has been draining. And perhaps, if you are lucky, the results look promising. The team has moved the project past the finish line. It is completed! Maybe there is some celebration, hopefully some pride, and almost certainly, some relief. The project is over.?

Whether the project was weeks, months, or years long, most likely a critical step has been left out. Before we mark the project complete, have we learned anything to make the next project better?

Enter the Learning Lookback

The U.S. Military calls this an After Action Review. It was developed as a way for everyone to learn from the experiences in the field, to improve things the next time around. A Learning Lookback is a planned step at the end of a project to look at what was learned individually and collectively in the project with the goal of improving the processes and results of all future projects. In other words, they are a planned way to ensure project improvements in the future.

Before we talk about what to include and how to run these sessions, it is important that we make it a planned step in any project – and one that happens before a team is disbanded. If it isn’t inside the project scope and objectives, it will be ignored, put off, or not done well.

Leading a Learning Lookback

With project improvement as the goal, and a mandate to have this session, you are ready to start. Here are the keys to a successful Learning Lookback:

• Invite everyone. You will need to define who “everyone” is but think more inclusive than less so. For monster projects, you will likely need to have these sessions for smaller groups.
• Don’t wait too long. As we have already said, you want this step inside the project. That should allow you to have this meeting before project team members have been pulled into new projects or are otherwise unavailable. Doing it sooner will also help because you won’t have to rely on your memories quite as much.
• Have a facilitator. If you are the project leader, you have a valuable perspective to share. Therefore, you should participate in the discussion and have someone outside of the project facilitate this conversation. Find another internal resource to facilitate or hire someone with those skills to help make this meeting most effective.
• Get everyone’s perspective. One of the big advantages of a facilitator is ensuring everyone has the chance to share their ideas and input. They can also help keep the meeting from becoming all about complaining, and keep it future focused – on how we can make the next project better.
• Focus on the questions. The heart of the Learning Lookback is the questions you ask. You want to think about what happened, what worked, and what didn’t. But you want more than a historical document. You want to capture what was learned for the future too. Questions like these are a starting point:
• What happened on the project?
• What worked well?
• What didn’t go so well?
• If you could go back, what would you change?
• What could we have done more of/less of?
• Based on what we learned, what do we need to implement on future projects?
• Think beyond the meeting. While having a robust conversation in a meeting is valuable, allow people to share asynchronously too. Send the questions out before the meeting to allow people to be thinking about it before they arrive. Then create a shared document or channel for people to add to the live discussion after it is over.
• Get the lessons. The questions should help you get to the lessons, but they must then be documented, and next steps for implementing those lessons on future projects must be completed. Unless you do this last step, most of the collective value of the exercise will be lost.

If you want project improvement – to make your future projects more effective than those in your past – implementing Learning Lookbacks and applying the lessons learned is your best next step?

A Question for You

Have you ever done something like I am suggesting?? If so, share below what you learned from doing it.

………….

Looking to learn some best practices in developing and nurturing an effective team culture?? Join us for our unique approach to virtual peer learning on May 1 to help you build your team culture.? Learn more and register here .

…..

A version of this article first appeared on our blog .

My Favorite Post of the Week

Why is Kevin Making Up a Word?

You might not find this word in Webster's, but it might change your life and your results as a leader and person. Watch...