Lessons Learned

At the end of big projects I like for our teams to put together a “lessons learned” document. It doesn’t have to be long or complicated, but just highlight the key things that went right and we want to be sure to duplicate, but also mistakes that were made that we would like to avoid. Then this document needs to be circulated and made part of training materials to help the organization continue to improve. It is important to find a way to systematize such learnings – otherwise the knowledge will reside in specific employees heads only (some call it Tribal Knowledge), but if this knowledge cannot be documented and shared, the learnings will be lost when that employee retires or goes to another company.