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

Once validated, each Volvo lesson is assigned to a designated recipient. That individual, usually a process owner or high-level manager, is responsible for resolving the issue or minimizing the risk identified in the lesson and reporting back to the committee on the solution that was implemented. In addition, as part of its validation process, the committee identifies certain lesson resolutions as organizational best practices, which are tagged accordingly in the repository.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has similarly defined processes for separating out project knowledge that needs to be addressed at a higher level. Throughout planning and execution, project teams capture all the details of their projects and outcomes in various reporting systems. However, only a small subset of the information in those systems is transferred into the center’s lessons-learned system and database, called Goddard Knowledge Exchange, which includes lessons from internal projects and other center sources.

Goddard project teams evaluate numerous data sources—including problems documented in monthly status reporting, problems identified via risk management processes and pause-and-learn sessions—to identify items with implications for other projects that should be submitted to Goddard Knowledge Exchange. A Knowledge Exchange working group, consisting of the chief knowledge officer and representatives from each directorate, evaluates project lessons for inclusion in the lessons-learned database and decides what knowledge is both applicable and important enough to be shared at that level.

Universally applicable lessons can be built into training for project leaders

The review and curation activities described above are highly effective for extracting project knowledge that should be shared with other teams and used to update project-related advice and standards. And for many organizations, that is the natural limit of project KM efforts. However, two of the organizations APQC studied take things a step further by isolating a handful of insights and lessons that are applicable not only to a particular process or type of project, but also to project management scenarios across the enterprise.

What type of knowledge is so universally germane and worthy of sharing? For those organizations, the focus is on skills and techniques for leadership, critical thinking, decision making, documentation and risk management. Deciding that face-to-face training is the best way to impart those skills, both organizations have analyzed

project successes and failures enterprisewide, selected a handful of situations that exemplify the themes they want to reinforce and built interactive training sessions to familiarize project managers with those cases and the underlying lessons.

The best example of this comes from global defense, aerospace and security company BAE Systems, which uses a case-based learning program to disseminate high-level lessons learned applicable across projects and sectors. Rather than focusing on specific technical or project knowledge, the program is designed to impart skills related to making sound decisions in complex, shifting environments. That emphasis was selected based on needs assessments and an analysis of the root causes behind the organization’s project successes and failures.

Before instituting case-based learning, most lessons learned were kept within sector-level silos or were “lessons noted but not actually applied,” said Mike Kessler, BAE Systems’ chief learning officer. “We had a lot of information overload and information management problems around lessons learned. We had to find the richest lessons and get them into a context where people could actually use them.”

To address that problem, BAE Systems’ corporate learning organization developed a series of detailed, MBA-style case studies based on notable past projects. Led by the chief learning officer, the learning group worked with business leaders to select the best cases to develop based on the strategic decisions or dilemmas faced by project teams. The cases are intentionally designed to cover a range of business sectors, wins and losses, captures and executions, national versus international projects, product versus service focus and key decision points.

During a typical case-based learning session, participants work through one case in the morning and a second, very different case in the afternoon. For example, if the morning case focuses on a “win,” the afternoon case might describe a “loss.” The instructional approach for each case is unique based on the desired learning outcomes, but every case is presented in three phases. For example, a session might include an initial review of materials to identify the assumptions and risks associated with a potential project, a deeper analysis of whether the project is worth pursuing, final analysis and practice transferring relevant knowledge to a project execution team. Each session ends with a review of key lessons and their applicability to participants’ current projects.

“We keep it interesting, fast paced and a little or very stressful,” Kessler said. “You don’t get all of the information you need; you don’t get all of the time that you need to put everything together. You have to make a lot of quick judgments and think on your feet in rapid timeframes.”

The case-based learning approach allows BAE Systems to address common themes across programs and sectors, such as risk assessment, customer intimacy and competitor intelligence. The training approach also gives participants a broader view of the organization’s programs and decisions.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center uses a strikingly similar process to extract crucial, universally relevant lessons and embed them in project manager training. From the organization’s pause-and-learn sessions and the lessons-learned database, the KM office develops case studies to share with all project teams. The project management office and the KM office sponsor workshop forums to share those case studies and real-time lessons from current projects. The format is one full day twice a year with case study presentations and panel discussions.

According to Ed Rogers, Goddard’s chief knowledge officer, the workshop forums bring the lessons alive for participants and help them understand what really went on in each project, how decisions were made and what outcomes resulted. “If this was important enough to cause a setback or cost overrun, then the stakeholders (usually at NASA headquarters) want to know: Did you learn? Did you understand why that happened?” he said. “It’s the same question they would ask about an engineering anomaly. Do you understand the root cause so we can be confident you won’t make that mistake again?”

The workshops allow participants to hash out project decisions and outcomes and learn from their own and others’ experiences.

Next steps

Although the techniques used to capture and transfer project knowledge vary widely, APQC recommends including a lessons-learned process in your toolkit of approaches. Document repositories and communities can prompt useful exchanges, but some insights only emerge when project teams gather together to analyze their collective experiences.

However, be warned: Many organizations put lessons-learned repositories in place and then fail to distribute and reuse the knowledge collected there. As you design your approach, make sure that you consider the potential audiences for the documented knowledge and how the organization will take action to ensure it truly “learns” the lessons that are captured.