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Cutting the Cost of Not Knowing: Lessons Learned Systems People Really Use
American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), May 2010, Pages: 87
Who in a big organization hasn’t observed corporate amnesia? Making the same mistakes again and again is the malady that “lessons learned” systems are intended to cure.
Lessons learned (LL) is a knowledge-sharing approach used by many organizations to capture lessons and proven practices from a project or event. Although the lessons can be applied to improve the current project, they can also be reused enterprise-wide to improve processes and policies, reduce risks, and minimize costs. Lessons learned activities are sometimes referred to as after action reviews, hot washes, post-mortems, project snapshots, or event debriefs.
Questions commonly asked during sessions designed to capture lessons and best practices include:
- What was supposed to happen?
- What actually happened?
- Why was there a difference or variation?
- Who else needs to know this information?
An effective lessons learned program can help an organization:
- avoid redundancy and reinvention by reusing existing designs and building on past experiences;
- improve the quality of products and services while reducing errors, rework, and cycle times;
- standardize best practices in order to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs;
- enhance learning proficiency and professional development, reduce time to competency, and integrate training and learning initiatives; and
- build a knowledge-sharing culture.
Yet, for all their popularity, lessons learned programs regularly fail to deliver the intended results. Although many organizations are quite successful at capturing lessons learned, these same organizations often struggle with learning and reuse. In other words, lessons may be captured, but they are not absorbed or applied even within the same project, much less elsewhere in the organization.
What is so difficult about lessons learned that many organizations’ programs wither away? In February 2009, the analyst launched a two-phase Collaborative Benchmarking study to answer this question and to develop a road map laying out a successful lessons learned strategy and approach. This report describes key elements of effective lessons learned systems based on the best practices discovered over the course of the study and the analyst's previous research in knowledge management (KM).
Before embarking on this study, the publisher's hypothesis was that many barriers to success arose from the LL process itself. Some of the publisher's suppositions are listed below.
- Context: If the lesson was captured or documented without the proper context (e.g., description of project, equipment specifications, political environment, scientific data), then the end-user who is looking for lessons to apply to his or her project or task cannot apply the lesson properly.
- Storage and retrieval: Organizations often have lessons learned databases or repositories where lessons go to die because they were not submitted properly and therefore could not be retrieved to be applied elsewhere in the organization.
- Understanding the customer for the lesson; Is the customer the current team that is in the midst of the project, or is the customer the future project manager or team working on a similar problem or task? Or both? A clear understanding of the customer for the lesson must drive the objectives of the lessons learned program, the development of any templates or tools, and the necessary process and impact measures.
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