Lessons Learned: How to Review Projects and Improve Results

Ever wondered how successful businesses stay successful?  It all starts with understanding processes. It continues by understanding how to improve them. In this practical lesson, you’ll learn what processes are, why they matter, and how they can help your business become more efficient, consistent, and ready to grow.

Once you have a process, you need process improvement. In this lesson you will learn about the basics of process improvement to better understand what it is and how it makes your business more successful.

This course will empower students to systematically analyze their workflows, implement changes for better outcomes, and build a culture that values efficiency, quality, and adaptability—key ingredients for sustained success in any organization.

Explore the critical challenges preventing successful process improvement in organizations. In this lesson discover the psychological, structural, and strategic barriers that derail transformation efforts. The better you understand them, the more likely you are to avoid them.

To implement process system improvements, you must have a process system. This lecture offers a high level introduction to the 10 most common such systems. Pick and choose the common elements and the factors that resonate the most with your business, and then create your own.

Who remembers the Notion?

It was Apple's first handheld device, the precursor to the iPhone. And it was a huge flop.

But the brand did not disappear. Quite the contrary.

The more you know about what could go wrong, the more you can do to make it go right.

Many businesses do reflect upon their past experiences or discuss general outcomes of a project. What they will do is look at a project overall, and then they might decide that if it has been successful, they will repeat it.

That is not a lessons learned analysis.

You may have already heard of both after action reviews and lessons learned. If you're wondering exactly what the difference is, you're not alone.

An after action review is an analysis of the outcome of a project. It is what you will use in your Lessons Learned analysis. Start by understanding the distinction between them.

It all starts with brainstorming what you remember.

Start by reviewing your process.

If something went wrong, your problem will never be the process as a whole, so it is important that you know how to break it down into individual parts.

Communication seems so simple. We talk, we gesticulate, we communicate.

But the truth is that in a business context, we need information sharing and we need information transfer, but most importantly: we need to understand and be understood.

Some of the mistakes that you made will be due to simple distraction.

Why is it important to review these types of mistakes as well? Is it really something that you can fix?

Well, possibly.

Not everything is your fault. Sometimes things happen to you. Sometimes problems are caused by external forces, which you can't control at all.

But you can control how you choose to react to them.

But what if there is something else that I am missing?

Start by going back to your original brainstorm. And do a last review.

You've now completed your after action review. You're going to use that information to compile your lessons learned.

And that is the focus of this next section.

Not every "lesson learned" is about problems. Let's start with your positive lessons learned.

Make a list of features to keep.

This video is the core of the entire class here on lessons learned.

In this lecture, you will learn how to compile your list of improvements based on what you learned from your execution of the project.

How long is your list of improvements?

Is it five items?

Is it ten?

Is it 25?

It's time to prioritize.

Not everything can or should happen right now.

Here is how to manage the lessons you want to save for a later day.

As you work on those improvements, don't forget to think critically about who should be involved in each one. It shouldn't all be led by you, and it shouldn't all and only be done by the people involved in the lessons learned exercise.

Data and analysis are all well and good, but staying on track through these efforts is essential.

An important skill in lessons learned is the ability to break a project, a procedure, or even an individual acting action down into its smallest components. That way you're isolating the micro steps that need improvement from the elements that are working as they are and shouldn't be changed.

This also teaches you to see your work as more than just success or failure.

Focusing on mistakes isn't easy. It can start to feel like you're doing everything wrong because you're only looking at what you're doing wrong.

Here are four reactions you want to avoid, so that you don't let your own work bring you down.

Mistakes should never be your primary goal. If you know that something is the wrong thing to do, then don't do it.

But we shouldn't be too afraid of them either. Here is how to learn to live with mistakes.

As with all things: your outputs depend on having good inputs. You need good information going into the discussion to have good ideas come out of it. A common challenge I've seen people confront is how to decide what is good information and what is not.

So here's one way to tackle that.

A personal story and another way to think of failure.

You are almost done.

But before I let you go completely, how about a trial run?