A lessons learned meeting is where the team gets together to discuss what went well and what didn’t go so well on the project.
It can happen at any point in the project. Traditionally, in waterfall approaches, lessons learned capture is something that happens as part of project close out, but agile methods have regular retrospectives throughout the project. There’s huge value in understanding what’s working early in the process, so you can make corrective changes. We’re seeing more and more project managers leading regular lessons learned discussions throughout the life of the project, without waiting until the formal project close.
A lessons learned meeting is similar to a project review, but does have a different focus.
What’s discussed in a lessons learned meeting?
The objective of the meeting is primarily to uncover things that worked so the team can do more of those or share the information with other teams. The other side of the discussion is talking honestly about things that didn’t work. Then you can switch up your process or take a different approach instead of repeating the same ineffective process.
Ultimately, it’s all about capturing organizational knowledge so the whole PMO can benefit from what one team learned on one project.
Setting up your lessons learned meeting
Before you can facilitate the meeting, you have to have a meeting booked. Think about who could contribute to the session and invite them along. In the past, we’ve run sessions for full teams and also sessions for parts of teams, for example, where the technical experts have wanted to discuss IT topics in detail and it hasn’t been relevant for other non-IT people to be in the room at the same time.
If you do split the session like this, you can consolidate the notes from all the ‘themed’ meetings and share them with everyone.
Book an hour or so for your discussion, and find a quiet location where everyone can meet in person or online.
Share the agenda
Next, put together an agenda for the meeting and share it with everyone. This helps them gather their thoughts before they come along to the meeting. The discussion goes faster and is more productive if people have spent time thinking about what worked and what didn’t for them personally before they show up.
When you send out the agenda, ask attendees to put some time aside to reflect on their experiences on the project to date so they come with ideas to share.
Facilitate the meeting
During the meeting itself, you’ll want to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and that you’ve got enough time to get through the different topics.
We often start with what went well and get teams to talk about different categories or areas of the project so we can group experiences together. For example, we might ask people for their feedback on the following:
- How well the project was planned and managed
- How well the solution worked
- How good communication was between the team
- How successfully the team managed risk
- How satisfied the customer is feeling.
You can also include topics particularly relevant to your specific project.
Once you’ve talked about what was successful for the team working together on the project, it’s time to turn the tables and talk about what didn’t go so well.
This is where your skills as a facilitator are key. You’ll want to make sure the criticisms and negative points are raised in a way that does not apportion blame. In particular, you don’t want any individual in the room to be personally criticized for their role. The best way to do this is to set expectations at the beginning of the meeting that the group will be talking about activities and not people, and to ask attendees to think about how they phrase and feedback their comments.
If you are expecting conflict, it’s worth having discussions with individuals before the meeting. Use soft intelligence and your own experience of working on the project to think about who might be likely to raise challenges that could create conflict. Talk to those people beforehand and let them share their feelings with you. Often, when people have the opportunity to be heard, they can then phrase their experiences in a more constructive way during the meeting. You may also be able to guide the conversation round to their point and perhaps raise it on their behalf, taking any personal elements out of it.
Capturing the discussion
Facilitating a lessons learned discussion can be all-absorbing so it’s often useful to have another person in the room responsible for note-taking. One alternative is to use a trained facilitator to lead the discussion and have the project manager recording the notes as well as contributing to the debate.
It’s very difficult to participate in the discussion in an objective way and facilitate at the same time. Many project managers want to talk about how well the project went and be able to participate fully in the conversation, so it’s common to bring in someone else from the PMO, another project manager, or even an external facilitator to allow them to do that.
After the meeting
After the meeting, write up the notes and circulate them to attendees.
However, there is another step after that. It’s one thing to identify lessons learned, and it’s a totally different step to act on the lessons and make the improvements you discussed.
Make sure that any lessons that are captured have a tangible action associated with them. That could be sharing information with other project delivery teams in the PMO. It could be making changes on the project so the rest of the project runs more smoothly, based on improvements identified in the meeting. Whatever it is, you have the opportunity to improve the way you are managing this project and future projects, so learn the lessons and act on them – otherwise this whole activity becomes a rather pointless paper-based exercise.
Lessons learned meetings are a powerful way to identify evidenced-based improvements, so make the most of that time with your team and work out constructive steps for delivering your projects more effectively, every time.