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How often do you apply lessons learned from past projects to new projects? If rarely, you're not alone, according to recent surveys. Here are some best practices and suggestions from the field that project managers can use to better capture lessons learned.
Transferring knowledge from one project to another can offer enormous benefits, yet a recent survey of 961 experienced project managers found that although 62 percent had formal procedures for learning lessons from projects, only 12 percent adhered closely to them.
The PM Perspective research team recently interviewed 15 experienced IT project managers in New Zealand and North America. We wanted to discover how organizations capture lessons learned and apply them to new projects. The findings, however, were discouraging.
Although many tools and processes exist for capturing such information at the end of a project, few organizations bother to use them. End-of-project post-mortems were infrequently and inadequately performed. Project managers cited the usual problems: a lack of time, key people not available, a culture of blame. And, as one interviewee noted, "most projects don't have enough budget to support any good closure."
Still, the interviews did yield some best practices and suggestions from the project managers, resulting in two key principles that project teams can use to more easily capture lessons learned:
> Project teams should start sharing knowledge at the beginning of each project
> Lessons learned should be captured when they occur, not later
These two principles work together.
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