Templates

The Lessons Learned Register is a project document used to record knowledge gained during a project. The knowledge attained can be used in the current project and entered into the lessons-learned repository, or a central store of historical lessons learned information from various projects, for subsequent use. Lessons learned are valuable knowledge assets for an organization and, therefore, you should be thorough and conscientious in your approach to reviewing and finalizing these documents. typical topics covered in lessons learned include: 

• Scheduling: Include any relevant scheduling problems or issues. They also document the management strategies implemented to deal with  schedule or resource constraints. These capture beneficial approaches to implement as new best practices.  

• Conflict management: Include any issues that arose within the team or between the team and customers. They include documentation of the nature and source of the conflict and the impact the conflict had on the project. The documentation should also specify how management intervened in response to the conflict.  

• Customers and vendors: If a vendor or customer is excessively litigious or unreasonable to work with, that information should be conveyed to the sales and legal departments and documented in the lessons learned repository. If the customer or vendor experience is positive, then capture the potential for future sales or working together.  

• Strategic: These typically affect some aspect of the organization’s project management methodology or significantly improve a template, form, or process.  

• Tactical: These answer the question: If you were to do this type of project again, what should you stop, start, and continue so you can execute the project flawlessly? These types of lessons learned focus on developing recommendations, reviewing recommendations with other managers in other departments, developing implementation plans, and implementing those plans. 

Knowledge is captured throughout the project and then consolidated at the end to provide historical information for future projects. The Content are similar to what you include in the final report to the organization and stakeholders, but the purpose of the lessons learned is to archive and share knowledge with the organization and future project teams. 

 

We provide helpful templates in most of our courses, and this is one is extremely important in closing a project. Click here to download your own copy of the Lessons Learned template. Come back often to see other templates to help your projects thrive!