Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned help to systematically evaluate experiences from a project and make them useful for future projects. This includes successful approaches as well as challenges and areas for improvement. The insights gained can then be used to derive concrete measures for future projects.

Prepare Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned should ideally be planned towards the end or as part of the project closure. To support the joint reflection, guiding questions can be defined first, for example:

• What went well?
• What did not go as planned?
• What would we do differently in the next project?
• Which insights should we capture for future projects?

In smenso, these guiding questions can, for example, be added to the description of a “Lessons Learned” task. The task then serves as a central place for documenting the results and the measures derived from them.

The guiding questions can be adapted or extended depending on the project and the project methodology used.

Document experiences and insights

The results of the joint reflection can be documented directly in the task. Using comments, project participants can record their experiences and insights and bring together different perspectives from the project.

The focus should not only be on problems. Successful approaches and decisions can also provide valuable insights for future projects.

Derive concrete measures

Concrete improvement measures can be derived from relevant insights. These can, for example, be created as subtasks of the “Lessons Learned” task.

This turns the collected experiences into concrete and trackable measures. The subtasks can be further edited as usual, assigned to people and scheduled if required.

For example, if it was identified that coordination within the project took place too late, this could result in the measure “Coordinate project communication earlier”.

Use Lessons Learned across projects

To ensure that documented experiences remain useful after project closure, it is recommended to structure and name Lessons Learned consistently across different projects. This makes it easier to find the corresponding tasks later and take them into account in comparable projects.

The global search in smenso can be used to search for and find tasks across projects. Particularly relevant Lessons Learned can therefore be referred to again when preparing new projects.

In this way, Lessons Learned not only document a completed project, but also help incorporate previous experiences into future planning and approaches.

Best Practice

• Plan Lessons Learned as part of the project closure rather than waiting until the project has already been archived.
• Consider successful approaches as well as challenges and areas for improvement.
• Where possible, involve different project participants to include multiple perspectives on how the project progressed.
• Formulate insights clearly enough that they remain understandable and useful later on.
• Derive concrete measures from relevant insights and take them into account in future projects.