Teams must proactively seek out and incorporate lessons from prior projects, not just document lessons, never to be referenced again! Consider taking a ‘Learning Before, Learning During, and Learning After’ perspective.

In PRINCE2®, this principle is not just something that is taken lightly. It is a fundamental part of what it means to manage a project according to PRINCE2® principles. Perhaps this is one of the most difficult aspects of incorporating the PRINCE2® principles into practice. Organisations who are rather low on the maturity model executives may not see the value in the team spending time on this for fear that the scope of the project will not be delivered on time. However, this kind of thinking is very outdated and can lead to a false sense of security.

Five things you can do to incorporate this principle into your day-to-day project management work include:

  1. Ask team members to seek out past lessons from similar projects that they feel would be good to consider for this project.
  2. Include lessons learned in every review and report during the project.
  3. Include lessons learned into every meeting during the project (even at the board level).
  4. Track whether the ‘lessons learned’ resulted in process improvements and process changes.
  5. Transition the lessons learned at project close-out, not only the product.

Sample questions you can include in lessons learned discussions or surveys:

  • What would you do that is different, if you could do the project over?
  • What project circumstances were not anticipated?
  • How would you describe the communications in the project? What can be improved?
  • What did you learn about the changes to scope on this project?
  • To what degree did you reuse lessons from prior projects in this project?
  • What is a key lesson you personally will take away from this project?
  • What worked for you in terms of what the project manager did during the project?
  • What could the project manager improve on for future projects?
  • What are the key factors that accounted for the results of the final project?
  • What was a project highlight for you?

How well do you think your organisation handles knowledge management and lessons?