Three Things to Un-Learn About Lessons Learned

Below is a recent blog post from CEB's PMO Practice.  Enjoy, and give me a shout with any questions!

- Chris

A project manager’s ability to quickly learn, unlearn, and relearn from project experiences is essential to consistently delivering on business outcomes. Most PMOs mandate a lessons-learned exercise during the closing stage to facilitate team learning and avoid repeating future mistakes; yet, most project teams are dissatisfied with the effectiveness of current approaches.

Our conversations with 30 PMOs reveal three misconceptions that hamper the learning process’ effectiveness:

Myth 1: Project teams must diligently and comprehensively document lessons learned.

Reality: Documenting lessons at the end of a project does not have a significant impact on helping PMs avoid similar problems in the future. PMs often end up creating comprehensive lessons-learned logs and storing them in large document databases that are then seldom used. In addition, the information captured becomes irrelevant after a short period of time as business contexts, project types, and technologies change rapidly. Instead of considering lessons learned as an administrative process, project managers must focus on learning throughout the project and develop skills that help them respond to issues as they occur.

Myth 2: Discussing project failures publicly will hurt promotion prospects for project team.

Reality: Our conversations with PMO leaders reveal that lessons-learned discussions on project failures aren’t detrimental to long-term team performance. Although the definitions varies by organization, a truly failed project is one that doesn’t teach anything. PMs must discuss praiseworthy failures (i.e., failures that result from complex, uncertain, or experimental projects) that are important sources of learning for their organization. For instance, PMs at a leading media company publicized stories of team failures and harnessed those lessons to radically improve product quality.

Myth 3: Failed projects provide more insights than successful ones.

Reality: Knowing what went wrong with a project is only half of the learning equation. The cost of not learning a best practice is less visible—but equally high—as the price PMs pay when they make the same mistake twice. The more diversified the set of projects PMs review and learn from, the more lessons PMs will learn. PMs should expose the PM community to innovative project management practices and introduce best practices that might not fall in the scope of their day-to-day responsibilities.

What are some of the challenges you have faced with lessons learned? We’d love to know!

• For tips on how to build a safe space that encourages project managers to share and learn from failures, please see Theta’s Collaborative Problem Identification.
• For a guide on how to encourage reflection on project progress more frequently and make timely course correction to ensure project success, please see these techniques, such as retrospectives for waterfall projects.