Learning from Experience or Lessons Captured?

This is an area that I have a particular interest in, coming from a Project Management background, and also because it forms one of the fundamental building blocks of Knowledge Management.

The first thing to clarify is whether it is genuine Learning from Experience, or merely Lessons Captured! In my experience there are many companies who undertake ‘Post Action Reviews’ (Post Project Reviews in Project Management terms), and from this identify valuable knowledge; what went well, what didn’t go so well, key areas for improvement, elements of ‘Good Practice’ to carry forward, all knowledge created during a project or task.

However, in most cases that’s as far as it goes. It is collected, but nothing is done with it; apart from being filed and forgotten about. I have come across organizations that have implemented a very well developed and sophisticated database that is fully searchable. But once the so called lessons have been captured, that is as far as it goes and nobody checks it for Learning Points.

Project Managers are particularly bad in this field, because as soon as one project is complete they want to get onto the next project. But that opens up the possibility to repeat mistakes that have been made previously; and not necessarily just from the last project.

In my view, individuals should be allowed to make a mistake…..once!, as this is how we learn, and ultimately innovate. If we can’t make mistakes we become less willing to take risks, and we stop innovating. However, this isn’t the theme of this post and is a separate subject area in its own right.

So there needs to be a means of ensuring that firstly the Learning points and Knowledge associated with each project are identified and captured, and secondly that once identified and captured they are used to improve future project/task performance, and the only way to effectively achieve this is by establishing appropriate Governance arrangements.

Coming from a Project Management background I would say that the governance needs to be based on the Project Sponsor not signing off the Project as being complete until a Learning from Experience/Lessons Learnt/Post Project Evaluation has taken place.

The next stage is to build in Governance such that the next project/task is not able to start until the Project Manager/Task owner demonstrates that the Learning from Experience/Post Project Evaluation repository has been examined. The Project Initiation Document should then show what lessons have been examined and what the PM is going to do to ensure that 'bad things' or errors are not repeated, and that he is building the 'good things' into the new project/task.

If the task/project owner starts the project having falsely claimed that there are no benefits or bad points to be utilised, and the project/task subsequently fails because of a repeat of something that has previously happened and could have been avoided, then appropriate action should be taken.

Ideally the Reviews should take regularly during the execution of the task/project, particularly on projects with a long duration. I have been working with KM and the approach I advocate is 'Continuous' review, re-baseline; the TQM/Continuous improvement approach.

The critical thing is that lessons lead to change, and if nothing changes, nothing has been learned.