English
Identifying Best Practices and Lessons Learned: a fundamental analysis to grow, improve and consolidate the organizations
13 December, 2021
Why a fundamental activity during a project, and at the end when it is finished, is the exercise of identifying best practices and lessons learned?
When we talk about best practices, we are referring to things we do to achieve the results we are looking for in a project. These are things that we should continue doing during the whole project and in other future ones. Lessons learned are those things that we did that did not bring about the expected project results and need to be re-thought. Identifying and understanding a project’s best practices and lessons learned is what will help us to grow, improve, and consolidate as an organization.
John P. Kotter in his book Accelerate, published in 2014, gives a reason why projects around the world have success rates under 30%; “Even for large-scale episodic change, there is very convincing evidence that organizations are now failing at least 70% of the time and that success in achieving early aspirations comes in fewer than 5% of cases. This fact is not widely known because people are reluctant to admit or advertise failures, for obvious reasons.”
What Kotter is saying leads us to conclude that to truly achieve the expected results when identifying best practices and lessons learned, we have to be precise, rigorous and honest when doing that task. Furthermore, we have to make sure that the activities identified as a result of the exercise are carried out. More so, the conclusions that come out of the exercise should be documented and made to be easily accessed by anyone in the organization.
Regardless of the project management methodology used by the organization, we recommend not waiting until the end of the project to identify best practices and lessons learned. It is important to plan this activity around important project milestones. If left as a final step at the end of the project, the opportunity to take advantage of the learning that comes from the exercise would be lost. You are missing out on the possibility of increasing the probability of the project’s success. You are not exploiting the best practices nor taking timely corrective steps.