Free template
Most lessons learned sessions produce a document that is filed and a next programme that repeats the mistakes. This free template is built to produce actions with owners rather than observations, and to be read by the people who start the next programme.
By Christopher Fagan, Managing Partner, PEF Consulting Partners
A note before you start
Most organisations already know their lessons. The same ones turn up in report after report, because a lesson with nobody’s name against it never gets fixed. That is why this template asks for an action, an owner and a date against every lesson. If you only fill in one column properly, make it that one, and send the finished report to whoever is about to start the next programme.
Christopher Fagan, Managing Partner, PEF Consulting Partners
Run the session within two weeks of go live or closure while people remember and before the narrative hardens. Collect input anonymously first, then discuss. Separate what happened from why it happened, and insist that every lesson ends in an action, an owner and a date, or a decision that no action is needed. Send the finished report to whoever approves the next programme, not just to the team that finished this one.
[Organisation name] | Version 0.1 | [Date] | Owner: [Name, role]
| Programme or project | Sponsor | Programme manager | Start and end dates | Final cost against budget | Final date against baseline | Benefits delivered against case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Five to ten lines. What the programme set out to do, what it delivered, the three things that made the biggest difference for good or ill.
| Area | What happened | Why it worked | How we keep doing it | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Area | What happened | Root cause (not symptom) | Impact (time, cost, quality, people) | Action to prevent recurrence | Owner | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Measure | Planned | Actual | Variance | Main reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | ||||
| Timeline | ||||
| Scope delivered | ||||
| Quality or defects at go live | ||||
| Adoption | ||||
| Benefits to date |
| Recommendation | Applies to | Who needs to hear it | How it will be embedded (method, template, training, governance) | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Item | Owner | Due date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Role | Name | Date | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsor | |||
| Programme manager | |||
| PMO or portfolio lead |
Template by PEF Consulting Partners, pefconsultingpartners.co.uk. Free to use and adapt.
Related reading: programme management consultancy, PMO consultancy, the free PMO maturity assessment, the RAID log template.
Both are correct. Learnt is common in everyday British English, while learned is standard in American English and in most project management guidance, so lessons learned is the usual name for the log and the report.
Within two weeks of go live or closure, and ideally at the end of each major phase as well, so that lessons from design can change build rather than waiting for a report nobody reads a year later.
The core team, the sponsor, key business users and the main suppliers, with the supplier session often held separately so people speak freely. Someone independent of the programme should facilitate.
Turn each lesson into a change to a template, a method step, a governance check or a training module, give it an owner and have the PMO check at the start of the next programme that it was applied.
If your programmes keep learning the same lessons, a short confidential conversation about how the PMO captures and applies them is a cheap place to start.