Implementing lessons learnt

The main problem, in my opinion, with post-implementation reviews is the difficulty with sharing the results with other people: making sure others don’t make the same mistakes you did and benefit from reusing things that went really well.

What’s a post-implementation review?

A meeting to evaluate the project’s successes and challenges and record any learnings for future projects; a way of sharing corporate knowledge.

The objectives of a review like this are:

• to bring everyone together at the end of the project to formally close it;
• to formalise the key lessons learnt during the project, and;
• to record this knowledge in such a way that it can be used by other projects to avoid the mistakes your project made or to benefit from implementing things that worked especially well.

Many companies don’t even bother with the review, which is very short-sighted, let alone succeed in implemeting best practice as a result of their experiences on other projects. The risk there is that best practice for your company is not the same as the professionally-received wisdom about best practice.

For example, I could tell you one way to manage assumptions but you know your company better than me and chances are that gives you an insight into how to adapt (or ignore) my advice and manage assumptions in your company much better. So learnings from the post-implementation reviews are really important to build up a database – whether it’s literal or figurative – about how projects work in your organisation.

I’ve seen two examples recently of where this works particularly well. NASA has a great database of key project learnings but unfortunately they are not applicable to the majority of projects in the real world as not many of us build rockets. A lot of the feedback is about highly technical things. The US Coast Guard though has put together a database which has been particularly useful following Hurricane Katrina. They were audited recently and the results are available in this report: Coast Guard: Observations on the Preparation, Response, and Recovery Missions Related to Hurricane Katrina. (GAO-06-903, July 31.)

For your own post-implemention reviews, there is a good sample document available from Queensland University, Australia (.doc)*. Another Australian document (.pdf), from the Government Chief Information Office is available too*. It’s a very comprehensive (perhaps too detailed for some companies) document and the checklist in Appendix C for putting together your report is very handy.

* I checked these links on 17/4/2011 and they were unfortunately no longer available.