Know Your Audience: Members at various levels of an establishment care about varying degrees of lessons learned. You will want to present customized reports based on your audience’s engagement in the organization.

Step five of the lessons learned process is to retrieve for use on current projects. This is step is rarely used at level 1. Although lessons learned reports are stored on a shared drive, without key word search capability, it is difficult to retrieve the appropriate lesson. Level 2: Evaluation of Lessons Learned Repository ENGAGE 2023 Smartsheet ENGAGE brings together our global customers, experts, and partners to share their experiences, ideas, and best practices. Learn moreThe person who will be facilitating the lessons learned session should prepare in advance. In preparation for the lessons learned session the facilitator should have the participants complete a project survey. The project survey will help the participants to be better prepared to respond during the lessons learned session and will also give them the opportunity to provide input if they are unable to attend. Laying out all your daily and weekly plans in one place like this is a great way to make sure nothing goes amiss, and our lesson plan formats are great for keeping all your tasks and objectives clearly laid out. What is a lesson plan?

A successful project manager recognizes the processes that help and hinder a team. They can also implement the lessons they have learned to improve those processes continually. There’s another task graph that measures the duration of the tasks, which is helpful in seeing what’s getting done on time and what’s taking too long. Finally, there’s a cost bar chart to help you stay on budget. Step three of the lessons learned process is to analyze and organize the lessons learned for application of results. At level 1 analysis is more informal as the team decides what can be done with the lessons learned. Information is shared with other teams during organizational meetings. Project management process improvements or training needs are often identified as a result of lessons learned recommendations. Step 4: Store lessons learned There’s also room for other line items on your budget, which include travel, equipment, fixed and miscellaneous costs. Finally, there are columns to collect the budgeted and actual cost for each line item, then a balance showing if the line item is above or under budget. Every completed project provides experience to the people working on it, whether or not it was a success. These lessons can be universal or specific to the task. Below are examples of lessons learned for different levels in an organization.

Sharon Sikes, PMP, President, Evergreen Project Management

This timesheet Excel spreadsheet template has space for your name or the name of the employee, their department, supervisor and hourly rate. The template collects their hours, such as their start time and end time for their workday. There’s even a place to add overtime and lunch.

There's usually a similar lesson plan format for each template - they outline objectives, resources, class names, and the main activities for the lesson. The key you want to achieve is Effective Metrics Reports which can only be achieved if the capture of project lessons learned data is consistent and maintained in a centralized repository. Achieving the Next Level Analyze the lessons learned, create a report, and share it with team members and other applicable parties. Sometimes, you will need to create multiple reports with the pertinent information for different audiences.

11. Issue Tracking Template

This template is conveniently divided into sections, and has space for you to outline the following: A lessons learned session focuses on identifying project success and project failures, and includes recommendations to improve future performance on projects. Project managers have a professional obligation to conduct lessons learned sessions for all projects with key internal and external stakeholders, particularly if the project yielded less than desirable results (PMI, 2004, p. 230). The lessons learned session is a very important part of the lessons learned process. If the session is not successful, the organization loses out on the lessons learned opportunity. Use keywords when storing your reports to make them easier to search for and retrieve for future projects.

Then there’s a section in this Excel spreadsheet template that goes over the tasks that have been executed over a period of time covered in the report. There’s space to note the status of tasks that aren’t yet completed and a section to list issues, talk about the budget and more. It’s a great way to capture a snapshot of the project in time. 15. Work Schedule Template Document and create a list of the lessons learned. This list should be a group effort and contain input from all team members. At level 2 organizations have a defined process and basic tools for identifying and documenting lessons learned. The process has become part of the organization’s culture and is consistently applied to projects and process documents have been revised to allow for more efficiency. Although organizations are consistently capturing lessons learned they are not fully utilizing them. Equally important, remember who your ultimate audience will be when preparing your metrics reports. Collect and store these documents for reference in future projects. These should be stored on a cloud server or a shared drive so that they are accessible for future reference to all members of the team at any time.You can use these lesson plans for whatever subject you need, as they're super versatile and easy to edit. No matter how well-planned your work is, there are unknowns that can impact your progress. Use ProjectManager’s free risk register spreadsheet to help you plan for risks in your work.