Project Reviews
If you use agile methods, you’ll be used to the regular cadence of retrospectives to do exactly that, but you can still hold regular lessons learned sessions even if you are working within a predicative or waterfall structure.
How do you actually do a lessons learned meeting? Here’s our short guide to running effective project reviews.
Invite the right people
The project reviews meeting’s aim is to review how the project went. You’ll be looking at what worked, what went less well, what the key learnings were and how you can improve as individuals, as a team and as a PMO running projects in the future. So you need the right people in the room.
Invite key stakeholders and the project team members. Try to get representation from every area that contributed to the project.
Top tip: Consider the seniority levels of the people who will be in the room. Sometimes we find that if the conversation is dominated by people at the top of the organization hierarchy, those attendees who are not as senior will contribute less to the discussion. If you think that could be a problem for you, it may be more appropriate to split the meeting and have two separate sessions, one with each audience, then bring all the topics back to the main group after both meetings have been held.
Have a clear agenda
Make sure everyone knows what is on the agenda for the discussion so they can prepare their points in advance. Ask them to think back and consider examples that illustrate how they felt about the project: it’s not adequate to simply say the whole project was a disaster or they didn’t feel informed. It’s only useful if you can dissect an example and say what didn’t go well so things can be changed for the future.
Send the agenda out in advance. Here’s an example of what to include:
- Welcome and introductions
- Objective for the meeting
- Small group brainstorming: what went well and then feedback to the main session
- Small group brainstorming: areas for improvement or challenges on the project and then feedback to the main session
- Action planning
- Any other business
Tailor that to suit your project and the level of debate you are expecting. Include different exercises or ways to discuss to make the meeting more interesting if it is going to run for more than an hour.
Use ‘soft intelligence’
In our experience, some lessons learned meetings get a little bit heated, especially when participants don’t have the same feelings about how the project went.
One way to deal with that situation is to have an external facilitator who is trained in running workshops and can lead the discussion. People tend to moderate their responses a little more when there is someone independent in the room! An external facilitator will be experienced navigating the emotions in the room and will make sure everyone feels heard while keeping the environment positive.
However, you need to know that level of debate is likely to be an issue before you hold the meeting in order to adapt how the meeting runs to get the best out of it. Make a few phone calls before the lessons learned session. Talk about what worked and what didn’t, and ask what kinds of things bothered stakeholders. Having the opportunity to get out the emotional response before the meeting can mean people have thought through their reactions and can present their experiences in a way that you can take positive action from.
Make an action plan
Following the meeting (or even during it), put together an action plan. This should cover specific steps that can be taken to address the points raised during the meeting. For example, if someone says that communication was not great during the project, talk about what good communication would look like and how you can get to that standard in the future. Then make an action plan to achieve that.
This simple step of thinking about what to do to make things better elevates your lessons learned decision from a simple list of stuff that didn’t go well to an actionable plan for continuous improvements.
Sometimes the improvements will be tiny things only affecting a single individual. In the communications example, it could be including someone in the circulation list for change requests so they know what’s being discussed. However, all the tiny improvements add up to create a most positive working environment and better chance of success for the project.
If the meeting uncovered a lot of things, it would be worth taking the step to invest in a health check to review in a more formal and structured way. This will help you identify where to spend the time implementing improvements and it will make sure you can keep the team on the right track.
Key takeaways
The key to success with lessons learned or retrospectives is to keep things positive even when talking about difficult subjects and things that went wrong.
Most of the effort is in the planning: make sure that the right topics get enough air time and that the right people are able to contribute. Then after the meeting, use your action plan to take practical steps for improving the way projects are run.
Next steps
It’s so important to be able to run a successful lessons learned meeting. Make sure that’s part of your project manager leadership development plans so that everyone on the team has the confidence to lead effective project reviews.