Why should you always document lessons learned?
What comes to mind when you think of learning a lesson? For most, what comes to mind is correcting a previous mistake and choosing to not repeat it in order to have improved outcomes the next time around. Lessons learned however are not only derived from ‘mistakes’. Lessons learned can be taken from the overall experiences in a project and are actively taken into account in future projects. It should gaze beyond the identified mistakes and also look at what worked well, what could be improved and what additions could be made the next time around.
A set process for identifying and tracking lessons learned throughout the project should be established even before the process beings. What templates will we use? Will we be having meetings to discuss? Who needs to participate in this process? The process of identifying lessons learned should be planned in, it is certainly not an afterthought.
When it comes to lessons learned, it can be a lot less effective to learn if you went ahead and didn’t take note and document the lessons you did in fact learn – timeliness and documentation are key. Documenting lessons learned, right after the lesson is learned, is a process that encourages you to acquire from experiences, record the experiences and gain knowledge while conducting a research, project, presentation or nearly any life situation. This process is to further assist in the improvement of future endeavours thus limiting improving opportunities for success.
Let’s get into reasons why you should document lessons learned.
1) Documenting lessons learned from previous projects will increase the success rate and decrease failures. Why? Because as you learn from your project, you’re making note of the aspects of your project that are effective as well as those that are ineffective. By taking these lessons into account, the next time around your project will be managed with the enthusiasm and knowledge that “this didn’t work in a similar project previously, let’s try a different approach”.
2) “Making a mistake is human, hiding a mistake is a crime and repeating the same mistake is a sin.” - Unknown.
Documenting the lessons helps you to not repeat the shortcomings you have identified. It’s great if you’re aware of what didn’t work in the previous project, but if you didn’t document it, you might just let one mistake from before, slip through the crack again. Better safe than frustrated.
3) With any organization, the more successful projects they manage or put forward, the more people will be inclined to work with them. Once you’re documenting the lessons learned, you’re driven to apply that new-found knowledge to future projects. You can increase the profitability of your organization or skills!
EvaluCore, through our understanding of the importance of lessons learned, has created a lessons learned template which we believe is an ideal tool to share. Reach out to us if you want help using this tool or to design other tools for your upcoming projects.
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