17. Lesson learned from your experience

Lesson Learned (LL) is the key for any project whether project was success or failure. Generally, we did not allocate the time for LL and we forgot many things to document and doing the same kind of mistakes again and again. This will eat most of the development team time by doing the same things again and again and literally project will be either unsuccessful or not doing in the efficient way.

In Project Management, Project Manager is responsible for documenting the Lesson Learned. I am not going to explain in terms of Project Management Lesson Learned. I am focusing on Lesson Learned in technical point of view.

Two important things can be performed from Lesson Learned.

1. Avoid the same old mistakes by focussing on Lessons Learned & try to improve the development efficiency.
2. Assess how can we do better than the last project from LL and use same methodologies/techniques which we used in the last project given the better output than anything else.

Next, what is Lesson Learned?

Lesson Learned is process of documenting gained by experience. It does not matter either project was success or failure. But still we need document the LL.

Who will initiate LL process and what to document?

Project team will initiate the LL process. Once project has been completed, project team should get together to discuss what has been done, how it’s performed, is there any better way, positive and negative actions…etc.

Please document once project team is agreed the valued points gained from experience and outcome of the project.

What are the examples of considerations for the LL process?

1. If your project team did spent lot of time for the particulate task, then in the LL process we can analyse to improve that process.
2. Think back & analyse what happened in the project and where we can fill the gaps to improve everything in the next project. For example,  let’s say if your project team did used latest technologies in the last project then they may be spending lot of time to debug and troubleshoot the problems as they using the that latest technologies in first time. So in this case we may come the conclusion from LL that it’s good to be get trained our development team  if we using the latest technologies in first time or don’t have any of our team members experience on that technologies.
3. Use the methodologies/techniques which worked in better way in the next project as well.
4. Document what are the different root causes of the problems while in development.
5. Document if you learned anything new from last project.
6. Capture everything what you did in the last project and come to the conclusion that based on the time which you spent on the each and every tasks.

Is there any Lesson Learned template can we use for our LL process?

You can download sample template from Microsoft office site http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/templates/project-lessons-learned-TC001144319.aspx and change the temple according your requirements and your project team suggestions which everyone agreed. Please note that you can download other templates which may useful for your team from http://office.microsoft.com. Please browse this site and use them.

Or

You can also come your with own template with your project team to document the LL.