“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh. Spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist.
———————
Lessons Learned Start Early
We at Aponwao, have always been a big fan of lessons learned. We collect them from day 1 of a project, and carry them into the next one.
That has stayed true across every environment we’ve worked in, and it continues guiding how we work today. The scale may change. The process does not.
From the start of each project, we keep a lessons learned database and add to it as the work unfolds.
For organization purposes we save them in the Project Closing Folder (*) not because lessons belong only at the end, but because by closing they should already be there, documented, and ready to use.
(*) We organize project documentation by project phase (initiation & planning, execution, monitoring & control, closing).
Capture Them as You Go
When working with larger teams some are surprised because according to their experience lessons are supposed to be collected at the end of the project—if collected. Yes, that closing phase when most key people are gone, and most everybody had forgot the good, the bad, and the ugly.
But lessons learned for us are treated as a live continuous process, not a closing exercise.
Even if there is no hint for the team that the information goes into a database, everyone is invited to contribute. In practice, when teams are overloaded with daily work, meetings, decisions, and constant issue management, capturing lessons learned rarely feels urgent. Knowing that, we build the process around reality, not around wishful thinking.
Though we as project professionals manage the process, this is a team effort. Everyone has a sphere of influence in strengthening collaboration.
We ask simple questions, along the way:
- What is going (or went) so good for you and the project that you would like to repeat in a future situation or project?
- Where do/did you, the team, or the project struggle so bad, that we don’t want to have those headaches again?
- What do you think we could avoid and what we could do better next time?
If something especially useful or especially painful came up in a conversation, or in a meeting, we log it. If a team member, or customer points to a pattern, we capture it. We note what happened, where it happened, and why it mattered. Not to build a file of grievances, but to build a record that could actually help the next opportunity.
This way, by the time the project closes, we had a full picture, not a last-minute memory exercise.
No Blame, Just Learning
Our closing reports include those lessons identifying what had real impact, what should be repeated, and what should be handled differently next time.
Lessons learned are never about blame. Blame is easy, but learning asks us to look at the conditions, decisions, and ways of working that shaped the outcome, so we can improve the next time instead of faulting the people involved.
If a lettuce does not grow well, we do not blame the lettuce and it would be shortsighted to blame the person in charge of watering it. We need to look at the full growing environment: the soil, the light, the timing, the instructions, and the care process.
Projects are no different.
Use Them on the Next Opportunity
Some lessons are easy to apply. Others run into habits, structures, communication gaps, or ways of working that are slow or difficult to change.
That is exactly why we don’t think of lessons learned as a historical record. We use them as an element of our practical planning tool.
When we start a new project, we share relevant lessons with the team at the start and ask for any experiences (good or bad) the team had had in similar situations, and that could be useful for all to learn.
If we know a certain issue is likely to show up again, we plan for it. Built into assumptions and constraints. Quietly, but intentionally. That way, we may not been caught off guard by a problem we had already seen before.
We capture lessons learned in collaboration with our teams, from the start and across the full lifecycle of the work, even when the effort or the team is small. There is always a learning. Always.
Lessons reflect actions that are worth repeating and actions that require a change to avoid them or improve the outcomes.
Do not let your lessons learned become lessons collected.
Their real value shows up only when they are used.
Photo Attribution: Selena von Eichendorf at Polish Wikipedia, GFDL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html>, via Wikimedia Commons