Best Practices for Preparing a Lessons Learned Document

Best Practices for Preparing a Lessons Learned Document

What do you do when a project is finally over? You celebrate. But not so fast; you might yet finish with your project if you haven't prepared a lessons learned document.

If you're attending a PMP training program or learning for PMP certification, you will understand why preparing lessons learned document is mandatory.

By gathering and publishing lessons, the team learned while finishing previous projects, your company as a whole benefits. You can help minimize the odds of other groups making the same errors and offer insights into how numerous procedures and workflows can be enhanced.

Here, we'll see some of the top practices in preparing a lessons learned document and how they can help a company enhance its project performance.

Best Practices

• You'll study in the PMP certification program, and you should reuse lessons learned from previous projects to manage your current ones better.
• You can save time by gathering lessons as you go along, and you can finalize them amid project closure when the project is completed. This is one of the top methods to ensure that the lessons are accurately recorded.
• Consider conducting regular brainstorming processes with the team to mine lessons that are insightful to the project. This helps in promoting the success of future projects. It's best not to leave until the project ends when memories become vague. 
• Ensure to include positive and negative experiences in the lessons learned document to add the highest value to the upcoming company projects.
• Ensure to include everyone, even relevant stakeholders, while preparing the document, where you prepare the list during or after the project. This will aid in collecting all the lessons in the documents.
• Consider holding a post-project survey to seek feedback on the project from the team, stakeholders, and customers well-acquainted with the project management. This helps in obtaining the lessons learned fresh in people's minds.
• Store your lessons document in a central repository in your company. This makes it seamless and more accessible for other teams to access whenever needed. Several companies have an e-portal for document sharing, such as OneDrive, SharePoint, or different centralized network locations.
• Lessons learned documents should be archived as historical data and merged into organizational lessons learned.
• The primary goal behind documenting the learned lessons is to offer other project teams data that increases their effectiveness and creates an experience earned after each project completion. Sharing your lessons learned with others helps enhance the overall company performance.

Conclusion

If you are working toward a project management accreditation, or considering to do so, iCert Global has project management programs, including PMP certification course that is created to help you pass the test on your first attempt.