Lessons Learned Session Summary Guidelines
Lessons Learned sessions are held during project close-out, near the completion of the project. Lessons learned are identified and documented during the project’s life cycle documenting the positive and negative experiences. The Lessons Learned will consist of a statement, and the advantages of using the lessons learned in future projects. This is the appropriate time to summarize and discuss the project as a whole. This will include any issues that have arisen in each phase and how the lesson learns could be applied in the future projects. At any time during the project, the project team member, project support staff and/or stakeholders might identify a lesson, which is typically apart of the lessons learned sessions.
The guidelines that would be used is to conduct one-on-one interviews with team members, which includes surveys, feedback and facilitate sessions with the project participants to address the following topics:
o Did the delivered product meet the specified requirements and goals of the project?
o Was the customer satisfied with the end product(s)? If not, why not?
o Where costs budgets met? If not, why not?
o Was the schedule met? If not, why not?
o Were risks identified and mitigated? If not, why not?
o Did the project management methodology work? If not, why not?
o What could be done to improve the process?
o What bottlenecks or hurdles were experienced that impacted the project?
o What procedures should be implemented in future projects?
o What can be done in future projects to facilitate success?
o What changes would assist in speeding up future projects while increasing communication?
The questions that would be asked are:
o Summarization of key project challenges
o What went well on the project
o Key finding and possible underlying cause: pm practice, development practices, organization issues.
o What went well and/or learned about the project in general?
o What was learned about project management?
o What was learned about communication?
o What was learned about budgeting?
o What was learned about working with sponsors?
o What was learned about working with customers?
o What was learned about what did not go well?
o What was learned about what needs to change?
o How will/was this incorporated into the project?
The information gleaned from this session could be documented and incorporated into future project plan by:
o Making sure the lesson learned is accessible to other projects.
o Broadcast the lessons learned to the project management community.
o Archive all project data in a central repository.
