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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Lessons Learned?

Capturing lessons learned at the end of a project is important. My problem has always been how do I archive the learnings for use in the future? Post implementation meetings are good for capturing lessons learned, but outside of the team members that attend the meeting where does this knowledge go? How can it be used in the future? Where and how should it be stored?

One idea I read about related to how Boeing maintains diaries of lessons learned from each airplane project. I wonder how these diaries are accessed and utilized on future projects? Are they searchable, indexed by topic, etc...

If anybody reading this has ideas, let me know and I will publish them here.

Until next time...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Steve, There is a professional society for Lessons Learned. The Navy, Department of Energy, US Army and many others contribute to this area.

jackvinson said...

Learning to Fly by Collison and Parcell is the best writing I have seen that talks about how to use Lessons Learned in a rigorous way (at BP).

They talk about how lessons are "baked in" to the how they manage projects, from checking for previous experience before starting a project to analyzing results during and after the project.

Regards,

Jack Vinson
Knowledge Jolt: http://blog.jackvinson.com