The Importance of Lessons Learned

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In my November 1, 2019 blog, I discussed my journey about becoming a Project Management Student. Now, I want to share the insights gained as a student from working with different teams on multiple projects. Learning always excites me as it provides a new experience. As the saying goes, “The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice,” – Brian Herbert, our life depends on the choices we make and hence we should learn the art of making right the choices. I was very excited on the first day of college; being a full-time college student after a long career thrilled me. Our class had students from diverse cultural, academic and professional backgrounds. These differences provided several benefits and challenges. Despite such differences, we all aspired to become successful project managers. The real fun in the course was that we learned by doing. This learning style is commonly known as experiential learning, the global buzz word in today’s educational sector. As Benjamin Franklin once rightly said, “Tell me, and I forget, teach me, and I may remember, involve me and I learn”; it is vital to learn from these experiences and apply the lessons learned in future projects. It is essential to capture the lessons learned throughout the learning experience (or throughout the project life cycle). 

Failure to do so increases risk exposure for future projects and sometimes may lead to missed opportunities. In each course, we undertook there was a project to complete, and every project concluded with the documentation of lessons learned. The main objective behind performing this activity was to improve the process as it is never 100% error-free and always has an opportunity for improvement. When we ignore to capture the lessons learned, we often fail to take the steps necessary for improving the processes. The avoidance of not documenting lessons learned is indeed a missed opportunity for a project manager. Initially, I was reluctant to capture the lessons learned during the project and often preferred to defer this step till the end. By not performing the necessary process of documenting lessons learned, it led to a few misses and repeated occurrences of the same issue. Upon realizing the importance, I decided to maintain lessons learned as a living document - A document that is continually edited and updated throughout the project life cycle. My decision to keep an existing document has helped me in capturing some of the best lessons. 

I always used a standard template to capture the lessons learned – “Avoid, Continue and Improve.” Avoid the activities which went wrong to remove the chance of being repeated in the future. Continue to repeat those activities, which went right, and Improve those activities which have an opportunity to do so. The project manager needs to involve the entire team while performing this activity as every individual can have their lessons from the project. Our team was involved in several brainstorming sessions, which proved to be very useful, and the sharing of the lessons learned was beneficial to the entire team. Remember, the only mistake in life is the lesson not learned. And one of the best lessons I’ve learned is to maintain a “Lessons Learned” document.

—Sameer Nandan Menda

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