Wednesday, 27 November 2019

Why you should never leave your lessons in the project report

Probably the worst place to store project lessons is to leave them in the End of Project Report.

Tombstone created using

I know this is still the default approach for many project organisations, and 19% organisations who run KM programs still use this approach (according to our KM survey). However this approach was linked to the second-lowest satisfaction score for lesson learning, second only to "we don't store our lessons anywhere". So leaving lessons in project files is only slightly better than not storing them anywhere.

But why is this the case?

It makes sense for the project team to leave the lessons in the report, because lessons are a project output, and surely all project outputs are documented in the report? Once the report is written, the job of the project team is done.

However although the job of the lesson writer may be over, the job of the lesson-seeker is only just starting.


Therefore they don't bother.

The lessons remain unread; the project report becomes a tomb in the lessons graveyard. Learned once, and destined to be relearned in future.

Two of the basic principles for effective lesson learning are that you need to 1) capture lessons individually, and 2) store them centrally. As I pointed out in yesterday's blog post, lessons are a knowledge output from a project, and should be stored with the rest of the knowledge, not the rest of the project files. In order to make it easy for the lessons to be found, you need to store the individual lessons under themes or topics in a lessons management system until they make their way into updated practice and procedure, guidance and training.

 If lessons are being learned from many projects, for example from Retrospects and After Action reviews, then these lessons need to be stored somewhere where they can be compared, reconciled, and actions assigned, notified, tracked and managed. They need to be captured in a consistent format, and stored in a central system.

 This is often done in some sort of Lessons Management System, set up either for a major business stream such as Sales or Engineering or for the entire organisation, to store and track lessons from many projects.




Leaving them in the project report graveyard destroys the learning loop at the first step.

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