What do you do with lessons learned?

I sat down for coffee with a couple of friends who facilitators workshops internally (AIW and 3P for those who speak LEAN+) and discussed project close out. A lot of projects seem the just trail off after the item or process is delivered and eventually vanish into the ether when the SharePoint site is closed and archived.

Closeout is the final phase of the project and is the first time we can really judge the success of all the work put into chartering, change management, the begging for resources and execution of the plan. I think it’s an important part of the project and determine the completeness of the project against the objectives we agreed upon up front.

One issue that seems to happen again and again is people leaving the project after their deliverable is completed, often prior to the closure of the project. While the customer primarily cares about the deliverable, the PM organization and project team members miss out on a post-project review and sharing the understanding of what worked and what did not.

Conducting a post-project review and capturing best practices to share with the PM community should be an essential part of the closeout phase. By not having a formal lesson learned or project review archive a significant amount of experience is not available for and important material is lost.

The PM community at work has an informal lesson learnt database and monthly lunch time “brown bag” meetings to share as a group, but there is not a formal process to manage the close out process and archiving.

I’m interested in seeing how other organizations handle this close out, recording and sharing lessons learned with their PM community.