Categorizing Project Management Lessons Learned; Usability is Key

When archiving project management lessons learned, it's important to categorize the lessons so that it's easy for future project managers to peruse them before the start of their project. Otherwise, it'll become more of a diary than a useful tool for the future.

Some people archive lessons learned by date, with a brief sentence summarizing the lesson. This is nice, but it'll rarely get used unless the database is fully searchable by keyword or text.

If it's just a long, running list of lessons in no special order without an ability to search by keyword or category, it's almost guaranteed you're wasting your time.

The best solution is a combination of lessons learned by category (ideally multiple categories, such as PMBOK process and project type) and searchable text. This way, a future project manager can examine the appropriate lessons as each project management process begins for a specific type of project. The bottom line is to think about how you'd go about managing a project and what would facilitate you're looking up past lessons as you enter each phase.

By the way, did you ever notice (pardon the Andy Rooney impression) that project managers always include a lessons learned session at the end of the project, but rarely include a step at the beginning of a project (or throughout a project) to examine previous lessons learned? Hmmm... Thought so.

And don't get me started about project managers who wait until the end of the project to think about lessons learned, by which time most of the lessons are long forgotten. Better to gather them throughout the project and have a formal review at the end of the project.

I'd love to hear from people with good lessons-learned systems that work and are used religiously.