 | ‘You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.’ |
| Sam Levenson (1911–1980) |
Introduction
The best way of avoiding mistakes is to do very little at all. Or you could stick religiously to the tried and tested, and avoid risk that way. However, neither option is a realistic one for a project manager – although over the years we’ve known a couple of people who have given it their best shot!
If you want your project to be productive and creative it’s inevitable that mistakes will be made. Once you accept this, you’ll see that managing a project is not about avoiding mistakes at all costs, it’s about learning from them and not repeating them. A brilliant project manager goes one step further and also searches out lessons that others have learned.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that what’s gone well provides lessons too. This involves identifying good practice, and -wherever possible promoting and repeating it. This is illustrated by the way a brilliant project manager will come armed with a range of good ideas and techniques from previous projects. This is equally a part of the lessons learned process, even if it’s not always recognised as such.
Unfortunately, the results of many lessons learned reviews end up sitting in a virtual electronic cupboard attracting cyber-dust. This is a waste of the time and effort spent on gathering lessons – not forgetting the cost of making the mistakes in the first place. So, although identifying lessons is an important step, the value lies in exploiting what you’ve learned. You’ll see a return on your investment only when mistakes are avoided and good practice is repeated.
In this chapter we’ll look at when and how you should set about capturing your project’s lessons. We’ll also look at the all-important step of putting these lessons to practical use.
How to make a pig’s ear out of lessons learned
- Concentrate on mistakes. Name and shame the culprits.
- Put everyone in the firing line. Previous good work on the project is not a get out of jail card when someone makes a blunder.
- Specify exactly what went wrong in excruciating detail. Avoid drawing any wider conclusions.
- The more, the merrier! There is no substitute for volume and nothing is too trivial to mention.
- Use lessons learned to settle long-standing personal vendettas and grudges.
- Fire out your lessons learned report to all and sundry, especially to the bosses of your biggest enemies.
Have realistic expectations
In our experience, organisations aren’t good at learning lessons. We see the same mistakes being repeated from one project to the next. We also see missed opportunities to replicate and build on good practice. There seems to be a lack of appetite – almost reluctance – to learn from past experience.
In many places, actively looking for things that could be done better or successes that should be repeated is not seen as a priority. In fact, time invested this way is seen as non-productive gilding of the lily. The emphasis is very much on just getting the immediate job done.
Some organisations do encourage the capture of lessons. However, too many then fail to take the important next steps of spreading the message and reapplying the experience gained. Sometimes this is because people believe their own circumstances are so unique that lessons learned ‘over there’ don’t really apply to them ‘over here’. At other times it’s just a lack of appreciation of the potential goldmine on their doorstep.
Whatever the prevailing culture, a brilliant project manager knows lessons learned are always well worth pursuing. There’s a great deal to learn from both your own and others’ projects. Much can be applied with immediate effect, or at the very least stored up for use on the next project that comes along.
Brilliant project managers are simply realistic. They know they can’t change the world, but they can tap into a wealth of experience to make significant improvements to the way they run their projects.
It shouldn’t happen to a project manager (but it did) ...
An organisation set up an ambitious programme and got its initial set of projects up and running. The project managers who set off first soon realised that their colleagues following behind were heading for many problems they’d already solved. They decided to share their experiences and invited the others to a lessons learned presentation. None of their colleagues turned up. Apparently, they were ‘too busy’ trying to deliver their projects. The second half of the programme then repeated many of the mistakes that their peers had already cracked.
It can be very frustrating when others refuse to take advantage of the experience you’ve gained. But, as long as you’ve done everything you reasonably can, that’s life.
All is not always lost for the greater good, as there are occasions when your lessons rub off on others – sometimes because you’ve decided it’s important enough to make the extra effort and sometimes just because you get lucky. However, don’t hold your breath waiting for this to happen; just see it as a nice little bonus when it does.
Creating a learning environment
The starting point for lessons to be learned is to create a project environment where it’s acceptable to make mistakes – with everyone willing to own up and to help get things back on track without too much fuss. The same principle applies to things that go well. You want any tips or tricks to be shared around, not jealously guarded. An honest and open culture, built on trust and mutual respect, is an essential ingredient for getting the best out of your team anyway.
Getting this aspect of the project culture right is doubly important. If people don’t feel they’re able to speak up, you’ll find out very late in the day that something has gone wrong. By then mistakes will be much more expensive to put right and more likely to blow your project plan out of the water. Even worse, your team could put effort into covering its tracks and hiding mistakes – time that should be used far more productively rectifying what’s gone wrong.
It’s also important that everyone involved in the project is encouraged to contribute to lessons, not just key personnel. For example, people on the periphery – or so-called bit-part players – can often offer useful insights that those close to the action might miss. In any event, you’ll always find that each person has a different personal perspective on what’s happened and what should be learned. So to develop a rounded picture you’ll need a good cross-section of feedback. It’s usually a good idea to extend an invite to your customers and suppliers too.
How to promote a learning culture
- Lead by example. Always be open about your own mistakes and highlight what the experience has taught you.
- Encourage honesty and openness. Respond constructively when team members tell you about their mistakes. In the first instance, concentrate on putting things right. Learn the lessons afterwards and don’t badmouth the ‘culprits’.
- Never miss an opportunity to emphasise your philosophy. Explain that making a mistake is not the end of the world and that the important thing is to learn something as a result.
- Promote the positive side of lessons learned. Identify the practical things that can be done to stop the same things going wrong in the future. Don’t forget to look for successes that should be repeated.
- Make sure that you have plenty of informal contact with your team members. Some of your best insights will come from corridor conversations.
- Never use a lessons learned exercise for pinning blame on individuals. Lessons should never be a front for settling vendettas.
When’s the best time to learn lessons?
On the rare occasions when a project team puts effort into capturing lessons, it’s usually the last act before the project is formally closed down. It would be just a little unfair to say this is closing the gate after the project team has bolted, but it goes some way to explaining why many potentially useful reports end up forgotten.
A brilliant project manager doesn’t wait until the end of the project to take stock. You should be alert to opportunities for learning lessons at all stages. This way, you give yourself the opportunity to make immediate adjustments to the way your project is run. It can also help you to fine-tune on your own terms, rather than be forced into a major change in direction in response to a mounting crisis.
We know that in the real world you’ll have a lot on your plate and this can make it difficult to be receptive to lessons learned. If nothing else, be prepared to take a closer look when events follow a familiar pattern – usually for the worse. Perhaps one of your suppliers consistently delivers a few days late or your meeting attendees keep cancelling at the last minute. Each event in itself might not be a major cause for concern, but taken as a whole there could be some deep-rooted, underlying causes that need teasing out and resolving for your immediate benefit.
Some of the best times to pick up lessons is when you see things go spectacularly wrong or extremely well. You’ll be repaid in spades if the lesson is immediately reusable, and, if not, at the least it will be captured for future use.
Don’t leave gathering lessons learned to the end of your project. Start a lessons-learned log on day one.
Although we’ve stressed the importance of learning lessons as you go, it’s also good practice to factor in set, formal review points.
Recommended review points
- When starting a new project. Review what you’ve learned from previous projects and collect lessons from your team. Plan how and when all the collated advice will be applied to the new project.
- When starting a new project stage. Review what’s been learned from recent project progress. Decide how your plan needs to be refined to take advantage of this experience.
- Just before project closure. Consider what you’ve learned personally and collect lessons from your team. It may be too late for the current project, but your future projects will reap the benefit.
Not only will these reviews provide you with useful checkpoints and prompts, they’ll also set the tone for your project. Your team will see this is something you value and take seriously.
Finally, don’t just think about lessons to be learned when you have a bit of spare time available. When things are going wrong and you’re under pressure, it’s natural to want to put lessons learned to the bottom of your to-do list. However, this is probably the most important time for you to take the time to step back and think about what you need to be doing differently.
The traditional gathering of lessons at the end of the project bears no immediate fruit, but it will provide invaluable lessons to take on to your next project. The process is a long-term investment and should be viewed as such.
The art of capturing lessons
Even if you’ve fashioned an open culture and lessons are obvious to your team members, it doesn’t follow that you’ll automatically get to hear about them. Your team will be concentrating on its immediate delivery objectives. It’s up to you to tap into your team’s collective experience and knowledge, and to make sure that lessons are captured.
One of your most important other goals is to get to the real lessons to be learned. Don’t simply take events at face value. Project situations are rarely as simple and clear-cut as they seem, even where there’s a fair degree of consensus within the team that black is white and white is black.
Most of your contributors will have only partial information about what’s happened. You’ll no doubt also come across a variety of opinions spanning superficial symptoms to important root causes. Most difficult of all, many will have already taken a parochial perspective on what lessons should be drawn – with the default position being that someone else is to blame.
The art of capturing lessons lies in getting a balanced view on what happened and then identifying the fundamental underlying opportunities for improvement.
Basic principles for capturing lessons
There are many ways you can go about capturing lessons, ranging from formal workshops through to informal corridor conversations. There’s a common thread running through all of these events: people teasing out reusable lessons by drawing on their key experiences – both good and bad. Therefore, the same basic process applies.
How to capture lessons learned
- Select the participants. Work out who’s best-placed to draw out the lessons learned. Make sure that you get a balanced cross-section and that they have an open mind.
- Confirm the audience. Be clear about who the lessons are aimed at. If they’re going beyond the team, consider how this will influence the kinds of lessons you want to capture and the way in which they’ll be described.
- Identify successes and failures. Undertake an objective review of what went well and what could be done better next time.
- Develop the lessons to be learned. Investigate the underlying reasons why events took the course they did. Agree what you’d do again and what you would do differently with the benefit of 20–20 hindsight.
- Document and review the lessons learned. Summarise and write up what you’ve learned. Make sure that the people who contributed agree you’ve described things accurately.
Defining lessons can be an emotive process. It’s difficult to make much progress if your participants let their personal feelings take over or they’re reluctant to move beyond initial impressions. In particular, you need to overcome a natural tendency to look for nice, simple answers that conform to preconceived ideas. A well-known example of this is that all of the project’s woes are down to having an incompetent project manager. Perish the thought!
Therefore, whether you’re running a formal lessons workshop or just meeting informally with a couple of colleagues, it’s essential that you use a logical and objective lessons learned process. You’ll find that the facilitation techniques we covered in Chapter 8 are invaluable here. Brainstorming can be used to generate starting lists of what went well and what didn’t. The important job of then separating out the key underlying issues from the surface-level symptoms can be achieved using root-cause -analysis. Finally, criteria-based decision making can be a handy tool for whittling down the lessons to those that matter most. This kind of approach will get everyone working together objectively towards a result that the team thinks is a fair reflection of what should be learned.
Informal techniques for capturing lessons
Lessons learned sessions don’t have to be big set-piece meetings that require vast amounts of time and effort to organise. Informal techniques can pay big dividends and at times are far more successful at getting to the heart of the matter. Although formal sessions are effective for groups, some individuals open up more freely when the approach is less formal.
Our preference is to use the long-established, workshop-based approach to sweep up lessons at the end of the project and at any other formal review points. We recommend applying more informal techniques en route.
Informal techniques for collecting lessons learned
- Top three survey. When you’re first introduced to someone who’ll be involved in your project, ask for their top three pieces of advice. This is especially useful for gathering initial ideas at the start of your project or project stages.
- Initial quick survey by email. Select a few individuals who are well-placed to identify lessons – and who will warm to the task. Ask them to tell you the most important things they think the project should be doing more of and what needs to be done differently. This technique is useful at any point in your project.
- Fireside chat. Pick out the one or two people whose opinion you rate highly and have an informal session in relaxed surroundings. These one-to-ones are excellent for topics that might be sensitive or where frank views are required.
- Lessons from your suppliers. Ask your suppliers what typically goes wrong on the other projects they’ve worked on. Ask what you need to do differently to avoid these pitfalls. Consider doing this when you’re planning or commissioning a new piece of work from anybody outside of your immediate team.
We refer to the techniques above as lesson learned lite. They’re the simple, low-cost things a brilliant project manager should do as a minimum. Also, because these techniques are low-key, they can easily be passed off as everyday enquiries where gathering lessons isn’t the norm and is frowned upon.
We suggest you consider recording the lessons in a log, as and when they occur – just like the risks and issues log. You should record enough information to remind yourself at a future date about what happened and what you’d do differently or repeat. As this log grows, it will provide you with a set of handy hints for your personal use and plenty of ideas to bring along to more formal lessons learned sessions with your team.
Formal lessons learned sessions
Despite all the advantages of informal options, we remain keen supporters of the traditional, end-of-term type review that’s synonymous with lessons learned. If you can assemble a representative cross-section of the project participants, and get them in the right frame of mind, they’ll spark off each other and deliver exactly what the doctor ordered. At their best, there’s no better way to get at the crux of what went well and what you could have done better.
Because of the diversity of people and opinions at these events, it’s important to prepare thoroughly beforehand – just like any other important meeting or workshop. A meandering free-for-all simply won’t deliver the important insights that will benefit you and your project.
In addition to your trusty facilitation techniques, you’ll need to come equipped with some prompts to ensure a fruitful discussion. Our two favourites are widely used, and rightly so. They have the added advantage of complementing each other nicely and give you the option of switching perspective if ideas are unexpectedly thin on the ground:
- Project themes: for example, people, processes and tools; or quality, resources and timescales.
- Project stages: for example, project initiation, requirements and design, construction and project closure.
You’ll also find these prompts come in useful for putting some structure around the lessons you capture.
Describing lessons
Even if you’ve done a brilliant job of capturing lessons, your success or failure in passing them on will hinge on how well you articulate what you’ve learned. You need to make sure you’re offering good advice that’s easy to understand and directly usable by your audience.
We have three golden rules when it comes to writing down the lessons themselves:
- Lessons must contain specific, realistic, practical pieces of advice.
- Lessons must conclude with recommended positive actions.
- Lessons must be free from references to individuals.
Not only do you need to keep the lessons brief and focused, you also need to avoid overwhelming your audience with numerous observations. If you do this they won’t take on board anything you’ve said. Imagine how memorable one isolated lesson would be compared with 100. Offer no more than 10 lessons for maximum impact and less than 20 whatever happens. Keep focused on the big winners; this really is a case of less is more.
Normally there will be a healthy mix of different types of lessons. Some will be simple, quick wins that can be immediately applied. Others will require far more effort but provide a bigger payback. Some measures will be short-term, others permanent fixtures. If you don’t end up with this kind of mix, it’s worth taking another look to see whether you’ve missed anything important.
Even if you aren’t planning on circulating your lessons more widely, we’d urge you to spend time documenting them in this way. The effort invested in distilling down and describing precisely what you’ve learned will sharpen your thinking. This will put you and your team in a much better position to benefit from your experiences.
Reusing and passing on lessons
Organisations aren’t good at learning lessons because people aren’t great at listening to advice, especially when it comes from one of their peers and it’s unsolicited. So, even if you’re armed with a bunch of excellent lessons and you’re feeling evangelical, remember to remain realistic about what you’re likely to achieve. Even a brilliant project manager has to settle for sporadic success when it comes to passing on their hard-won lessons.
One thing’s for certain: simply mailing out your lessons with a friendly note urging your colleagues to benefit from your experience will meet with an indifferent response. Perhaps you’ll even unintentionally antagonise some of them, leaving them wondering, ‘Who’s this joker telling me how to do my job?’.
Take an opportunistic approach to passing on your lessons. It’s much easier to offer advice if you see one of your fellow project managers struggling with a difficult situation you have grappled with previously.
Charity starts at home
Project managers – brilliant or otherwise – are not measured by their ability to pass on their lessons. For your own career success it’s far more important that your lessons are reflected in improvements to the way you run your own projects. Without doubt, you’ll be the keenest to benefit and anything else is an added plus.
In our experience, the most often-repeated mistake is the failure to think hard enough about previous lessons at the start of a new project. It’s like Groundhog Day because projects seem to begin with very little recollection of previous misdemeanours and good practice. However, it’s at the start of a new project when all your previous, hard-won knowledge can be put to best use. Make sure you get the project team together for a day specifically dedicated to looking at lessons and factoring them into your current project.
One of the greatest challenges for a brilliant project manager is keeping the search for lessons on the everyday agenda. The big advantage of looking for lessons as you go is that you can often take advantage of them immediately. This becomes second nature after a while – making small adjustments to the way you and your team operate on the back of experience.
There are several ways to make the pursuit of lessons part of everyday project life. Our preferred option is to link this to the maintenance of the risk and issue log – where you are regularly thinking about what might go or has gone wrong. It’s a small leap to consider what you could do better next time when things go wrong or to take note of good practice when a risk is neatly side-stepped.
Avoiding the major pitfalls
Gathering lessons should be a positive experience. However, if the exercise concentrates too much on where there was scope for improvement, there’s a danger that an air of gloom will settle in. Teams can get obsessed with picking over the bones of a project and create the impression that nothing went right. In extreme circumstances, even a project that was a rip-roaring success can be torn to shreds by an over-zealous lessons learned workshop – seizing defeat from the jaws of victory.
To combat this, it’s essential to remind everyone that lessons are about the positive, not just the negative. Make sure your contributors spend time looking at what’s gone well for the project. Set a positive mood by starting with a few judiciously chosen successes, as it also helps people to relax. Then end up with a few golden nuggets to close on an upbeat note. Remember this may well be the last public outing for your project team, and leaving a final, positive impression can be as important as gathering useful lessons.
Occasionally, identifying lessons is seen as an opportunity to set the record straight with thinly veiled criticisms of certain people – especially when they are outside the team. This is counterproductive and must be avoided at all costs. Even when there’s no malicious intent, it serves no practical purpose to name individuals or mention project-specific events. Generalising and depersonalising lessons is crucial, and it takes practice.
Start by removing named individuals, specify an action and home in on the root cause. For example, ‘order all materials required by tradesmen well in advance and arrange delivery one week before they’re due to start work’ fits our criteria. Whereas, ‘Norman Nobrains forgot to order nails for the carpenters and they wasted a morning waiting for an emergency delivery’ does not.
Our final tip on avoiding major pitfalls is: chase quality, not quantity. A brilliant project manager should aim to capture the really important lessons – those that stand out from the everyday ifs-and-buts of any project. If you’ve collected lessons during the project, make sure you and the team sift through them and pick out the winners. If your lessons are defined in a workshop, call a halt when you can see that you’re in danger of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Summary
The traditional approach to lessons learned can look like a timeconsuming and pointless business and, frankly, we agree wholeheartedly. Highlighting and advertising your mistakes – and nothing more – is at best pointless and at worst it’s professional suicide. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the judicious handling of the lessons learned process is one of the best ways to spot a brilliant project manager.
For a start, lessons are not just about mistakes, they should also include everything you’ve done well. For some strange reason project teams seem keen to draw attention to their mistakes, however trivial, yet seem almost reluctant to mention any good practice.
Gathering lessons requires an investment of time and resource that’s pointless in isolation. No matter how clever or profound the lessons are, your outlay is repaid only if they are put to good use. The sole criterion for judging lessons should be how useful they prove to be. It’s not about how big your report is, it’s what you do with it that counts.
For lessons to flourish, projects need a healthy, blame-free culture where making mistakes is not the end of the world – a culture that encourages innovation and good practice. Steer the team away from vendettas and self-abuse.
Many project managers are sceptical about the value in identifying and using lessons. We think you’ll be surprised by the immediate payback this can provide. Get your team together today and ask: what could we be doing better right now? After that, you won’t need to be convinced about the longer-term benefits.
- Fear, blame, backstabbing and cover-ups are not just blockers for lessons, they’ll undermine all aspects of your project.
- Don’t try to avoid making mistakes at all costs. Just make sure you don’t make the same mistakes twice.
- Cheer up! Don’t forget that there are some things that went really well on your project. These are just as important.
- Don’t overuse big set pieces. There’s always time for ‘lessons learned lite’.
- Don’t get hung up about passing on lessons. Concentrate on using them yourself.