The mechanics of completing lessons learned efforts can be deceivingly simple: You get people in a room (physically or otherwise) and discuss opportunities for improvement based on what they experienced during a project. However, many teams and organizations experience difficulty in realizing the full business value they expect from their lessons learned efforts. 

First, it is helpful to define what a lesson learned is. In a broad sense, a lesson learned is knowledge created over the course of past work that is recalled and applied to improve present and future efforts. For example, a project team overcoming a challenge by adapting an existing process or tool can yield innovations towards future project approaches. Another team may dissect a failure to identify what has gone wrong and enact changes to avoid it in the future. In this blog, I discuss five tips on how to capture and apply lessons learned in your organization. 

Identify moments of high-value knowledge capture

Memory can be quite fragile. Details of what occurred as part of a project can get fuzzy quickly, and the more time goes by, the greater the mental effort any one person must spend in retrieving their memories. 

Many teams incorporate a lessons learned component at a project’s conclusion through retrospectives or after-action reviews. If your project or initiative spans multiple months, or even years, then waiting until its end to elicit lessons learned runs the risk of missing key details, simply because participants have already forgotten. 

The antidote for loss of key details over time? Identify moments of high-value knowledge capture and incorporate them into your project or sprint plans in advance. If you are working as part of the project, you may not need to wait until the end to begin capturing lessons learned, for every stage of the project represents an opportunity to discuss lessons learned. For instance,  if you have made important decisions, tried out something new, or experienced something that did not go as anticipated, it is important for team members’ memories to be as recent as possible so that they can recall valuable and meaningful details.

Include the right voices in the conversation

In increasingly complex and distributed work environments, it is rare that any single person can get (or give) a full view of what is happening in a project with all of the interdependencies and interactions that affect the outcome of an initiative. Therefore, discussions can benefit from the holistic perspective that a diverse group can bring. 

Consider the team members, stakeholders, and partners that can contribute to these conversations, and invite them to participate in the lessons learned discussion. Moreover, think broadly; these individuals are likely to span across multiple functions and up and down hierarchies. If relevant, bring people in who are external to the organization, such as partners, vendors, consultants, and others who may be able to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the project. Make the most out of everybody’s time together by defining an agenda and prioritizing specific discussion points beforehand. 

Engage people meaningfully 

Acknowledge participants’ own preferences, habits, and agendas. These will differ widely, especially when dealing with a diverse group. Establish ground rules, expectations, and objectives for a lessons learned session early on, and enforce them. If necessary, do a quick touchpoint with select participants prior to the session to ensure alignment on the objectives and prevent any surprises. 

Keep in mind there may be individuals who dominate conversations and others who are naturally quiet. There will be some participants who need to talk out their ideas aloud, while others may need quiet time to reflect. In order to elicit the most powerful nuggets of knowledge out of participants, you may want to leverage a variety of channels: some verbal, some asynchronous, some written. The key here is to adapt your approach to maximize peoples’ contributions. In addition, while a live session may be the best method to maximize engagement, the reality of work is that some people will need to join remotely, and others in different time zones may not be able to join at all. Having a diversity of options for engagement will enable a wider segment of individuals to participate. 

This being said, the purpose of engaging stakeholders in lessons learned is to get a holistic account of how the work was done, what factors influenced the project’s results (whether expected or unexpected), and what can be done so that future projects can perform better. Here is a list of key knowledge nuggets that you should try to elicit:

1. Business context. Things seldom remain the same on a project, as assumptions are proven wrong, new constraints arise, and competing priorities emerge in other parts of the business. You may ask participants, “What are things that future projects should look out for and mitigate earlier on in the project?”
2. Key people, partnerships, and other relationships. Interactions that proved instrumental throughout the project. 
3. Skills and expertise. Whose skills and expertise came in handy at different points in the project? Did the project’s work help develop new skills? What emergent needs will we need to address in the future?
4. Introduced innovations. Often, teams will adapt existing processes, practices, or technologies to overcome specific challenges that arose during the project. These may be helpful to collect and disseminate throughout the organization so that other projects can leverage these innovations. 

Finally, conversation should be focused on producing actionable insights. These should consider modifications to the way work is conducted before, during, and after the project concludes. It is helpful if these tasks have an owner, a deadline, and someone to provide guidance and oversight in case people run into delays or roadblocks. 

Save captured lessons learned for easy retrieval and reuse

People may contribute as many ideas, insights, and learnings as they can, but if there is no way to effectively capture lessons learned in a manner that is consistent and retrievable, then these learnings will be difficult to find and apply in the future. 

To capture lessons learned effectively, you need two things:

1. A designated repository for storing lessons learned. Organizations often have a patchwork of solutions: Confluence, Google Drive, SharePoint, shared network drives, and sometimes individual spreadsheets. Different teams may have decided to use any one of these as knowledge bases for their needs, but if everyone is using something different, then lessons learned become difficult to find and understand. Having a designated place where teams store their lessons learned sets the foundation for making them retrievable and reusable. 
2. A consistent structure and tags to organize and classify lessons learned so that they can be easily searched for and found later. A consistent structure provides a set of attributes that defines what a “lesson learned” looks like, such as a title, lesson details, the type of project, the phase of the project that it applies to, the lesson’s topic, and others that would be relevant to describe and categorize the lesson learned. Having a standard structure makes lessons learned easy to write, and it also makes them easy to filter when trying to find them.

Loop lessons learned back into your business processes

In my client experiences, I’ve often seen lessons learned become an item in a to-do list; as long as they have a meeting at the end of the project or fill out a simple report, they can claim they do “lessons learned,” but the organization is not meaningfully learning.  

An organization doesn’t actually learn unless it applies the lessons and knowledge it has captured to present and future ways of working. For example, lessons learned may lead to changes in the way projects are staffed, introducing checks and safeguards at different stages of the project, bringing in experts or stakeholders when certain types of decisions are made, or including certain knowledge as part of new employee onboarding. 

There may be several challenges to organizations being able to apply lessons learned. There may be technical considerations in capturing, retrieving, and curating lessons learned within a knowledge base, or the lessons learned may require individuals to change their behaviors and habits. 

From a technical standpoint, building on having a knowledge base and consistently-tagged information within it, lessons learned can be indexed by a search tool to make them increasingly findable. More advanced applications would include integrating lessons learned into a knowledge graph so that they can be associated with different data and artifacts across the organization, then incorporated into a recommender system that proactively delivers relevant lessons learned to project leaders at key moments throughout the project.

Behavioral challenges can be tricky to overcome as well, and you can take both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to address them. Top-down strategies may include embedding lessons learned retrieval throughout different project stages or prior to key project activities. However, these will need to be complemented through a bottom-up approach: The people receiving new knowledge in the form of lessons learned must be convinced that the knowledge is valuable and that applying it will bring benefits to their work. A holistic change management and communications approach may be necessary to reinforce the expectations around lessons learned, share success stories, and reiterate the value that lessons learned bring to individuals and their teams. 

Closing

Lessons learned, captured and applied effectively to future projects, can bring a bounty of benefits to organizations. The knowledge that is generated as part of everyday work can, and should be, leveraged to improve the results of future work—enhancing the experience for organizations’ customers by learning to better anticipate their needs or prevent mistakes, their employees by better delivering the resources they need to succeed, and their bottom line by achieving efficiencies and introducing innovations. 

At EK, we specialize in all things Knowledge Management, from strategy, to design, onto implementation and maintenance. If you need any help setting up or improving lessons learned, we will be glad to help, no matter where you are on your journey. Contact us today!

The post Five Tips for Improving Lessons Learned in Project-Based Organizations appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Agile practitioners often forget that Agility is an expression of values, not the observance of rules and procedures. Whether your team is Agile or not, Agile principles and the Agile Manifesto can provide guidance. Like the open office plan, Agility seeks to incubate efficient and productive interactions. These are naturally lessened in isolation, so you must take proactive steps to compensate for their loss. Specifically, Agile communications, user/customer engagement, and management are three areas in which teams must pay special attention in order to successfully adapt to this new operating environment.

Communications

The Agile Manifesto tells us that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a team is face-to-face conversation.” The most obvious solution is of course… use your webcam! But sliding back your webcam’s cover isn’t enough. Teams must establish norms. These might include whether camera use is required, when calls can be recorded, and what’s considered appropriate attire (for example, casual might be OK for intra-team calls, but business casual attire required for all others). The value of webcam use extends beyond the typical benefits of visual communication; it often communicates a sense of transparency to outside collaborators. Before the crisis, I often heard clients praise our remote team’s openness after one or two video calls with work-from-home team members.

Speaking of transparency, effective and open written communication is especially important for remote teams as well. Modern ChatOps tools like Slack go a long way towards achieving this ideal. Project-oriented Slack channels create a common and transparent system of record for project progress and communications. They also help demonstrate team members’ contributions that might otherwise be hidden. For instance,  it can be all too easy for a timid team member’s work to go unappreciated in a remote environment. Written communications that are visible to the entire team mitigate this problem. If your organization has been unexpectedly thrust into a remote operating environment, you should consider implementing a tool like Slack immediately.

It’s also important to acknowledge the increasingly asynchronous nature of our communications. As working hours expand stemming from varied at-home needs and geographical distribution, our ‘on time’ overlaps less and less with our co-workers. When using Slack, clearly and concisely communicate your ‘ask’ of your counterpart. Be sure to articulate any required information for a substantive response; in other words try to anticipate any clarifying questions. This approach helps leverage the core advantage of Slack… a single interface for both synchronous and asynchronous communication.

Customer Engagement

The cornerstone of Agility is user feedback; indeed the Agile manifesto demands that “our highest priority [be] to satisfy the customer…” and to do so by “delivering working software frequently.” As the world temporarily slows, don’t forgo customer engagement and use the lack thereof as an excuse to slow your velocity. Further, don’t assume that digitally collecting quantitative metrics means you can abandon qualitative feedback. If it’s difficult to recruit for in-person focus groups, find alternatives instead of reverting to gut instinct. Explore other engagement avenues, such as online focus groups or reaching out to power users for one-on-one conversations. Some ChatOps tools even allow for direct customer engagement. Remember, when using iterative frameworks, your customers must help inform what you build next. Chances are, their needs have radically changed in recent months as well. You should take this opportunity to welcome their changing requirements into your backlog.

Management

It can also be difficult for managers and executives to adapt to remote work. The Agile Manifesto provides guidance here as well, telling us to “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” From a management perspective, enablement and trust are foundational for motivating individuals. 

You must enable teams by listening to their current needs and provisioning the necessary tools to get the job done. If your team tells you they’re having trouble communicating, pilot new communications tools quickly. If the team is having trouble with remote network access, explore new technical solutions. The worst thing you can do is suggest that the team ‘just make the best of a tough situation’. 

Once providing your team with the requisite tools, managers must trust the team to use them effectively. Resist the temptation to ramp up check-ins or demand more status updates. These actions indicate and breed a mutual lack of trust and are likely to be perceived as micromanagement. Status update calls also create the illusion of progress while taking up valuable time. Perhaps counterintuitively, managers might consider taking a less hands-on approach when shifting to remote work. Set clear expectations around outcomes and timelines, and then allow team members the freedom to ‘wow’ you with their progress. Remember, “Working software [or business outcomes] is the primary measure of progress.” Checking off the status update box once per week is not a valid measure. 

The bottom line for managers is that teams must feel heard, and then enabled. If your organization is struggling to adapt to remote work, hold retrospectives in smaller groups that specifically address your unique remote work challenges. Those meetings should include actionable next steps and suggestions that remedy the concerns raised. Pilot tools, such as Trello, which allows managers to monitor progress in real-time, but from afar.

In Conclusion

Agility has always been about values, not timeboxes or fancy names for meetings. Holding the values of transparency, direct user engagement, open and honest communication, and trust isn’t enough to be successful, particularly in a remote working environment. You must inspect and adapt your approach to these values in our brave new virtual working world. Recognize that your retrospective time is more important than ever. Hold that time as sacrosanct and embrace macro-level assessment during these meetings. Each team is unique; your retrospectives will uncover their uniqueness and help you drive towards remote working efficiency. If you’re having difficulty getting started, contact us and we’ll be gladly help you explore the next steps on your remote working journey.

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EK has worked with organizations across the world who are looking for their workforce to become more adaptable to changing circumstances. They face similar challenges:

• Staff is hindered by silos
• Ingrained staff
• Uncertainty of how to measure change
• Day-to-day responsibilities take precedence over strategic initiatives
• Lack of accountability to see change through
• Fear and mistrust amongst staff because change hasn’t gone well in the past
• Vision for change seems too high-level or impractical to execute

Change management – changing mindsets, changing behaviors, and then reinforcing and sustaining those changes over time – is not simple, but it doesn’t have to be hard. There are ways to work with your organization instead of against it to set up the right structure, processes and relationships to support change at either the business-unit or enterprise-level. At EK, our change management experts practice what we refer to as Integrated Change Management (ICM). ICM combines leadership strategy, employee engagement, processes, success-metrics, and training to ensure swift and sustained adoption of change. It places your people at the center of the process to make change real, and ensure it sticks.

EK’s ICM offerings include:

One Day Workshop

Our one-day workshop is all about knowledge transfer and setting a clear plan of actionable next steps. Our change managements experts will empower your staff to:

• Align on succinct, clear purpose for intended change.
• Establish ‘numbers and narrative’ that report real ROI for the organization.
• Develop key messaging that can be repurposed across different communication vehicles.
• Identify influencers and resistors to the change.
• Utilize Integrated Change best practices and principles for staff to use in managing any change initiative.

Build a Solid Foundation

Over the course of 6-8 weeks, our change management experts will work alongside your team, providing customized coaching to set a change strategy that sets your organization up for success. In preparing your people to implement the change strategy independently, our work will include:

• Breaking down the vision for change into concrete milestones with measurable success criteria.
• Assembling a team that will lead and support the execution of the change initiative, and teaching them best practices to support their work.
• Identifying what processes and transitions will be impacted by the change.
• Determining how the organization can support employees throughout the transition.
• Coaching senior leadership to help them understand how they can best support upcoming changes.

At the completion of the 6-8 weeks, you can expect to receive the following deliverables: Enterprise Alignment, Scope Definition, Measurable Success Criteria, an established Change Team, Leadership Coaching, Risk Assessment, and an Influencer Analysis.

Full Engagement

EK is equipped to lead your organization through the strategy, design, and implementation of a highly customized Integrated Change Plan. Integrated Change is a three-phase approach – Aligning, Surfacing, and Realizing – with each phase building on the work accomplished in the preceding phase. Central to our work, we will collect data at every stage to determine if your organization is on track to meet its milestones and then adapt the Integrated Change Plan as necessary.

In the first phase, we align leadership’s vision to the organization’s operational strategy, and work to get everyone on the same page regarding why the change is necessary. We remove ambiguity, define success metrics and coach leaders on how they can best contribute to sustainable change.

In the second phase, we bring to the surface the thoughts and concerns of staff and mid-level managers regarding the change. Through this process, we proactively uncover the ways in which people would passively or actively resist the change and devise a plan with built-in mitigation strategies and specific data-points to guide iteration and communicate impact.

In the third phase, we realize the vision and the intention of the change by implementing the Integrated Change Management plan with established check-in points. At each check-in, a high-level brief is provided with concrete data supporting areas in which the change is taking hold and where more focus is needed. Clear direction is provided to leaders, empowering them to make data-driven decisions and adapt in real-time to save the organization time and resources.

Contact us to find out what offering is best for your organization at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

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If you are exploring ways your own enterprise can benefit from implementing AI capabilities, we can help! EK has deep experience in designing and implementing solutions that optimizes the way you use your knowledge, data, and information, and can produce actionable and personalized recommendations for you. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

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