5B LESSONS LEARNED

At the end of a project, we need to collect our most important lessons learned. There are different levels of lessons learned:

• Project manager and team members: In order to support their personal development the project manager and his or her team members want to know in which areas they performed well and where they need to improve.
• Project stakeholders: For major project stakeholders, especially the customer, it is important to capture the project's success factors and weak areas.
• Involved organizations: Any organization involved into a project needs to keep the key data of the project and make them available for the rest of the organization so that the rest of the organization can learn as well.

We collect lessons learned in workshops and meetings:

• There will be a workshop for the project team including the project manager where they collect their most important learnings for their further career.
• Major project stakeholders will call for a meetingin order to discuss the project success factors and weak areas.
• In involved organizations we will find processes based on which meetings are to be held in order to feed the project's key data into existing knowledge management systems.

In our example, the project of the new desk, we keep our main learnings:

• We need a good plan in terms of scope, schedule and budget in order to enable us in implementation phase to compare actual with planned results.
• A profound risk analysis is integral part of project planning so that we can identify preventive and corrective action for events that could jeopardize the project or its results.
• We need to involve experts in project planning in order to support effort and duration estimation and risk analysis.
• We will see events in implementation phase which we did not plan for and which will call for changes in our approch to the work, of the plan, the requirements and, in serious cases, even of the goal.
• Our management of all work and eventual changes in implementation phase shall be based upon the optimization of the triple constraint of project management: scope, schedule and budget.

Finally, the major stakeholders decide to declare final acceptance of the project results.