Project Management Lessons Learned; Think Practical!

I've already written about the foolishness of documenting lessons-learned without having an up-front project management process to review prior lessons-learned. Think of the adage, "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, did it make a sound?"

Assuming you do have such a process to review prior lessons-learned, it's also necessary to think about how one would go about doing such a review. Chances are, you're not going to begin a project and say to yourself, "Let me look up some lessons on Earned Value Reporting." More likely, you'll want to look up lessons for the type of project you're managing or product you're developing. Maybe later during the project, you may want to look up lessons on certain project management questions.

The key here is categorizing your lessons-learned properly. If you add keywords or categories that are product (or project type) specific, along with any relevant project management process areas, you'll be more likely to have a useful format for researching these lessons. Of course some lessons are simply process related. But we need to try to include product or project type related lessons as well, in order to have a truly practical repository.

For more info, see my post from yesterday on Project Management Categorization. Meanwhile, I'd be interested in hearing others' experiences on categorizing and reviewing lessons-learned.