Record lessons learned

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As part of closing a project, it’s a good idea to record lessons learned. This can help you in planning future projects. There are various ways you can do this. One way is to create a Lessons Learned task to represent a meeting. Capture meeting notes in the task updates. Or you can attach a custom form to the project to capture the lessons learned information that you want as the project is being executed. An advantage of the custom form is that all the fields are reportable, so you can build custom reports to review and manage this information, identifying lessons learned across many project types or sets of projects. Here is a simple example of such a report. This is called Projects with Unresolved Lessons Learned. These are all custom fields. You can edit the fields right in the report if you want. You can have multiple selections for a field like Action Taken. And you can filter the report on this field. Here is a companion report named Projects with Resolved Lessons Learned, which filters on a different action. If your organization has a more complex post-project process, one that has enough steps to qualify as a project itself, it might be best to create a separate project and work front. With this method, you can close out the project used for the actual deliverable, which keeps your completed project reporting more accurate. Then use the separate lessons learned project to track any steps that come after.