David, the best way to deal with massive numbers of lessons, is to embed them into guidance and best practice. You may have hundreds of lessons now, in a few years you will have thousands, and asking
people to sift through these, resolving contradictions, sorting through repeat and duplicate lessons, becomes completely impractical.
If you look at organisations which are successful in lesson learning, such as NASA, the Oil Sector, the Military etc, you see that the lessons database (or lessons management system) is not the final
repository of the lessons, but is a clearing house, directing the lessons to the subject matter experts who will embed them into procedure, process, guidance and doctrine. The lessons management system only holds those lessons which are still in process of
being learned, and once that lesson is embedded into working practice it can be considered “learned” and removed from the system.
Project managers therefore only really need to follow the updated guidance, into which the lessons are embedded, rather than sifting through hundreds or thousands of entries.
You can find more details of this approach
on my blog (here for example), and in my book “The Lesson Learned handbook”. The attached article may
also be useful.
Nick Milton
Knoco Ltd
www.knoco.com
blog www.nickmilton.com
twitter @nickknoco
Author of the recent book - "The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook"
"Ambition without knowledge is like a boat on dry land."
--Mark Lee
Hello all,
As I have mentioned in previous messages, my KM Team has a number of work-in-progress efforts aimed at enhancing our overall knowledge sharing environment. One of our targets for this year is a focus on a more
standard approach to soliciting, gathering, capturing and providing access to key lessons learned from variety of projects and initiatives.
My question to this group regards your knowledge and insight around the storage of those lessons learned and providing access to lessons learned/insights for a broad audience to tap into and consume. Let me set
the context so you have a sense of where our challenges lie.
Our primary source for lessons learned typically comes from significant, cross-function, multi-year projects … so numerous people involved, a wide variety of functional areas participating, and broad range of
potential knowledge areas for learning. Over the past months we have worked with a handful of project managers in soliciting lessons from their project team members as part of the project wrap-up/closeout; helping us get a sense of the breadth and depth of
what those teams learned during their initiative.
Frankly, the volume and value of what we have received back is beyond our initial expectations. The team members, individually or in small functional groups, have been great in answering the standard set of questions
we have crafted and capturing replies in the format we have provided (Excel for now). One team, for example, consisting of 15 individuals provided us with more than 70 individual “line items” of lessons learned on anything from budget/finance, communications,
design & development, marketing/commercialization, production planning, risk mitigation … and on and on across a long list of knowledge areas and activities. Currently, from six projects we’ve ‘tested’ we have over 500 lessons learned, but grouped (and captured)
specific to each particular project.
Here's one of my biggest challenges … if we have hundreds of lessons learned what’s the best way of capturing and sharing (e.g., making them accessible) those without overwhelming our audiences … while making
it easy for them to find the right lesson in the right context?
So, bottom line … would love to know good, effective approaches you’ve seen around capturing and sharing those lessons. What have you seen around lessons learned from broad-ranging projects?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and insights!
Best regards,
David Graffagna
