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Lessons Learned Template
You just finished watching your favorite band perform another amazing show! You leave the stadium feeling great about the concert and singing your favorite songs. Everything was perfect! Perfect for you, that is. The band, however, may not feel the same way. They might be pleased with the show, but not consider it perfect. The guitarist came in too early here, the drummer was playing too loud there, and the lighting guys really messed things up at one point.
That’s why they’ll get together later to tighten things up, perhaps after the show or at the next rehearsal. Call it a debrief, after-action review, or a multitude of other names, it ultimately comes down to identifying and implementing Lessons Learned before the next show.
A reflection on how your projects and teams performed sounds like something that could help deliver your next project better. The PMO Leader Lessons Learned Template provides the format you need to capture and implement lessons from each project so your next one will be the best one yet!
How do you Use the Lessons Learned Template?
At the outset, assign someone to be responsible for capturing Lessons Learned. It could be you as the project manager, or a team member who is a good listener and can capture when something either went well or could have gone better.
- Date - Enter the date the lesson learned was captured.
- Description - Write a brief and clear description. Doesn’t need to be long, but it does need to be informative enough to be able to talk further about it with the contact person on the same row.
- Project Phase - Where in the project did this lesson appear? There is a long list of options to choose from, but keep things consistent and simple with no more than 3 - 5 phases (for example, something that corresponds to planning, execution, closure, and review).
- Global or Unique - Is this a lesson that only applies to this project or team? Select Unique. Is this something that others in the organization could benefit from? Mark it Global. You can be a good corporate citizen and share your insights with others.
- Lesson Value - Is this a positive or negative lesson learned? If it’s something you want to continue doing in the future because it helped, mark it as Positive. If it’s something you don’t want repeated because it caused pain, mark it as Negative.
- Category - Are there any corporate partners that need to be aware of or work with you on this lesson learned? For example, Legal, HR, Finance or some other team outside of your project team?
- Impact - Keep it as simple as High, Medium, and Low. This will allow you to sort, filter, and prioritize upon the ones that will give you either the biggest positive return or eliminate the largest negative consequence.
- Repeat - In other words, is this lesson learned a repeat offender? Was it identified on a previous project and then the same thing happened again? This will help you prioritize and avoid garnering disparaging comments as discussed above.
- Recommendation(s) - High level recommendation of what needs to be done differently on the next project.
- Contact - The most knowledgeable person to talk to about this lesson learned if more information is needed.
Going through this exercise produces a long list of lessons learned. Now, prioritize this list based on Lesson Value (Negative), Impact (High), and Repeat (Yes). Carve these off into a mini-project where as many of these as possible can be implemented before the next project.
Benefits of Using a Lessons Learned Template
Using the Lessons Learned Template will allow you to:
- Deliver Projects Better - Increasing productivity and profitability should be a goal of every project manager. Smoothing bumps out, filling in gaps, and making the project delivery process better will move you in that direction.
- Introduce Accountability - A typical conversation after talking about what went wrong on a project often results in, “Yeah, we should fix that,” with nothing getting fixed. Capturing these issues in a lessons learned template and moving them over into a project plan with what, who, and when ensures they get done.
- Benefit Others - You can prevent others from experiencing the same pain you and your team did, by sharing Global lessons learned with other teams.
- Culture of Continuous Improvement – Success builds success. When teams focus on improving they establish processes to help them do just that. Building in continuous improvement to the culture allows the team and organization to improve without much added effort.
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We’ll walk away from a concert and for years to come, talk about the great times and memories we had with our friends. But, we’ll walk away from a project, and the very next day will forget what we needed to do to make the next one better. The PMO Lessons Learned Template will give you just the place to jog your memory and make sure your next project performance is the best one yet!
Download the Lessons Learned Template!