Project teams and KM—Part 3
The benefits of identifying and sharing lessons learned across projects

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, lessons-learned workshops focus on specific project events. The KM office facilitates after-action review sessions called “pause and learn” at key decision points or after project incidents (e.g., failures or near misses) that require reflection or risk management. The sessions are designed to allow project teams to transfer lessons informally within a rich context of discussion. During each 90-minute session, 10 to 20 project participants work with a facilitator to examine a recent project event and come to agreement on what worked, what didn’t, what to change for next time and what can be learned from the experience.

After each pause-and-learn session, the NASA Goddard KM office drafts a concept map based on the proceedings, which the project manager, deputy project manager and team members validate and sign off on. (see Figure 2 on page 27, KMWorld Jan/Feb 2018, Vol 27 or download chart) shows a basic concept map template. According to NASA Goddard’s KM representatives, the concept maps enhance the pause-and-learn process by enabling teams to clarify and visualize the relationships between various observations and resulting recommendations. In addition, the process of validating and finalizing the maps helps clear up any misunderstandings from the session and moves the group toward consensus on key issues.

At global IT and communications equipment and services company Fujitsu, project teams capture lessons learned through a collaborative process driven by the organization’s robust project management community. During dedicated sessions called Jump Start, the project manager gathers with client representatives and other Fujitsu project managers who have delivered similar projects, worked with that same client or are well-versed in the client’s industry.

Together, that group of stakeholders discusses project execution and outcomes. Adapted from an approach used by ExxonMobil, Jump Start sessions are designed to evaluate projects in an informal, nonjudgmental environment and surface new ideas, tools and a wide range of issues. The sessions may occur at the end of smaller projects or at specific milestones within larger projects.

Curation allows organizations to pinpoint lessons that require broader action

Once project knowledge has been surfaced and documented, the next step is to filter it so that key insights and lessons rise to the top. A great deal of the knowledge that a project team captures will be relevant only to the team itself—or perhaps to a handful of sister teams performing similar work. However, a subset will need to be circulated to a broader audience or institutionalized in processes, procedures, tools or other official guidance.

The organizations APQC studied use a variety of approaches to separate out knowledge that is broadly applicable across the organization, distribute it to the appropriate stakeholders and get those stakeholders to act on it to improve project outcomes. Some emphasize top-down strategies in which leadership committees evaluate knowledge and lessons for distribution and incorporation into official guidance, whereas others have adopted more organic methods that rely on the wisdom of crowds to help pick out key knowledge “nuggets” that other project managers should take note of.

Volvo Group Trucks has a structured process to ensure that knowledge generated by project teams is transferred to the right people and used to improve all projects (see Figure 3 on page 28, KMWorld Jan/Feb 2018, Vol 27 or download chart). As described earlier, Volvo teams conduct workshops at each project stage gate to uncover challenges and lessons. The teams themselves perform the first step in the knowledge filtering process: For each issue raised, the group evaluates whether the issue has potential implications for other projects. If the issue is internal to the project, the team is responsible for correcting it, and no one else needs to be informed or involved. However, if the issue has broader impact, then a more extensive follow-up process is triggered.

For external issues (i.e., ones that affect other projects or parts of the organization), the Volvo project team is expected to log the issue, root causes, the proposed solution identified during the workshop and the suggested recipients (i.e., individuals who would need to implement the solution) in a lessons-learned log. A committee of senior project managers meets every two weeks to review the log, refine and validate the submitted lessons. Once confirmed by the committee, lessons are published to a central repository where other project teams can access them.