PROJECT Management explored

Lessons Learned is a difficult area and an important one to get right.  We all make mistakes as we human and we all face challenges on our projects that is the unexpected nature of projects but the occurrences and impacts of these can be reduced if we learn lessons from those that have been in the same or similar situations before us.

It is obvious but very difficult to achieve.  Even after you have got over the significant challenge of getting people to record the problems they faced (as we are as much talking about challenges as opportunities) on a project you still have to share this information back into following projects in a focussed and helpful way.  Recently we set up a very helpful and simple solution for a PROJECT in a box customer to help them with the process.

We created a very simple Single step method template called Lessons Archive and created a project from it which was made available to all users with read access.  Using the share documents between projects feature we then linked in the Lessons Learned Log from each project on the system so it was shared into the Lessons Archive project.  This means that any content placed in the Lessons Learned Log document in the original projects will be available through the Lessons archive and it's content indexed for searching.  When a new project is starting the PM can visit the Lessons Archive and search the indexed content from all previous projects by providing their key words and being given the matching results which they can then view to find out more.

Because the documents are live shared between the original project and the Lessons Archive, if the project is archived or removed from the server it's Lessons Learned log document contents will be retained in the Lessons Archive so building an increasing archive of content for the following projects to take advantage of.

As further extensions it would be possible to provide a link to the Lessons Archive in all new projects (by adding it to the method templates) so guiding new PMs directly to an area where they could search the archive and to automatically notify the Archive owner (perhaps the head of PMO) of any new additions to the archive contents with notifications.

Creating these simple, intuitive tools is straightforward in PROJECT in a box and a good demonstration of how the tool set provided can be used to your advantage.  If you would like to see this in action or add a Lessons Archive to your PROJECT in a box system, drop me an email and I will share the method template.