Privet everyone! I hope it is okay to be a little informal in the introduction.
I am Svetlana, writing from Kyiv, Ukraine, where I work as a senior PMO analyst for a financial technology company. I have been in project management for nine years and I have one frustration that has followed me through every organisation I have worked in: lessons learned sessions that produce beautiful documents that nobody ever reads again.
We do the retrospective, we write the report, we put it in SharePoint, and then the next project team makes exactly the same mistakes six months later. It is almost funny if it was not so frustrating.
I am trying to build a system where lessons learned actually flow into the way we plan and execute new projects. Some ideas I am exploring:
- Mandatory lessons learned review as part of project kickoff, not just at closeout
- A searchable lessons library tagged by project type, phase and risk category
- A short monthly 'lessons digest' sent to all project managers
Has anyone actually made this work? I would love to hear real examples, not just theory. What made the difference in your organisation?
Svetlana, my honest answer: rarely. I have been part of maybe thirty lessons learned sessions over the years and I can count on one hand the times the output actually changed how the next project was run. The format is usually the problem. You produce a long list of retrospective observations, file them somewhere, and nobody has the bandwidth to act on any of it before the next project is already underway.
The only thing I have seen work is when a specific person is accountable for doing something differently, not the team in general, not the PMO, one named person with one named behaviour change. Otherwise it just becomes a document that proves the session happened.
Joost's point about format is right. One thing that helped us: we stopped doing lessons learned at the end of the project and started doing it at key milestones instead. Mid-project you still have the context, the frustrations are fresh, and there is actually time to change something before the next phase. End-of-project sessions capture good information and then the team disperses and it goes nowhere.
Still not a complete solution. The lessons from one project rarely reach the next unless the PM happens to be the same person.
The dispersal problem is real. We tried a central lessons library and nobody used it. What actually moves knowledge between projects is people, not documents. If the same PMs rotate across projects, or if the PMO actively connects teams facing similar problems, learning travels. If not, it doesn't. I am not sure there is a system fix for this. It might just be a people and relationship problem.
The "people not documents" observation is probably the most honest thing in this thread. Libraries of lessons do not travel. People do.
The only thing I have seen add to this even slightly: PMO-facilitated handoffs where a project lead spends an hour with the incoming lead before they start. Not a formal debrief, just a conversation. It does not capture everything, but it captures the things the person thought were actually worth remembering. The written report would have had forty items. The conversation has three.
Still does not solve the incentive problem Svetlana raised. Nobody is rewarded for making the next project's life easier.