• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Learning the Lessons

Question 20: Have you looked at the lessons learned from your project?

Good Practice: Every project has the potential to help you run future projects more efficiently. Assess whether the project was a great success, a total failure or somewhere between the two. Concentrate on the big, important lessons from the project, the ones that will have a significant impact on your future projects.

In his article Lessons Learned: Why Don't We Learn From Them? Derry Simmel identifies two common problems preventing us from learning valuable lessons from past projects:

1. We think the lessons don't apply to us.
2. We want to get things done.

The sad truth is that these lessons learned are useful. That time spent in doing the work better is time well spent. That getting it right the first time is cheaper and easier than doing it now and fixing it later.

History has a strange way of repeating itself. If we don't take time to learn our past lessons and act on them, we will repeatedly commit the same mistakes.

Common Mistakes

• Being too busy to evaluate projects when they have finished.
• Moving on to your next project before reviewing the last.
• Failing to heed the lessons from past projects.
• Not making lessons learned available to other people in your organisation.

Warning Sign: Making the same mistakes time and again.