How to Get Your Next Lessons Learned Meeting Right

There’s one Project technique that has the capacity to transform your skillset and raise your Project Management to the next level: the Lessons Learned review.

So, in this article, we will take a look at everything you need to know about how to make your next lessons learned meeting a great success.

This will be a big guide, so let’s buckle up and dive in…

First, What are Lessons Learned?

Here’s a short video that answers the question: ‘What are Lessons Learned?’

What we Will Cover

In this article, we will cover 10 topics, starting with the basics:

1. What is a Lessons Learned Meeting?
2. Why do You Need Lessons Learned Meetings?
3. When Should You Hold a Lessons Learned Meeting?
4. Preparation for Your Lessons Learned Meeting
5. Your Primary Lessons Learned Success Criteria
6. How to Structure Your Lessons Learned Meeting
7. Facilitation Tools for Your Lessons Learned Meeting
8. Lessons Learned Meeting Outcomes
9. Lessons Learned Meeting Follow-up
10. A Simple Lessons Learned Maturity Model

If You are More of a Video Person…

And you prefer watching and listening to reading, I have done a video that covers most of the content of this article. Watch the video, and then scan the article for the extra details.

What is a Lessons Learned (LL) Meeting?

First and foremost, a lessons learned meeting is a safe place to share thinking and insights about a shared experience. And that will feature strongly as my first, primary, and principal reason for holding an LL review.

It is a meeting where you look back on the last stage of your project – or, indeed, your whole project.

In your review, you’ll draw lessons for the next stage or your next project. So, you’ll need to cover:

• Successes
  This should come top of your list. If you focus too much on the negatives, you run the risk of damaging morale. That isn’t to say you should brush those under the carpet. Absolutely not.
• Failings and unintended consequences
  You must also look at what didn’t work. But do so with a spirit of curiosity to better understand them. It is not a place for recriminations or blame. Things will go wrong. And, if anyone was at fault, I hope you will have dealt with that at the time.
• Trace Cause and Effect
  This is the principal way you will understand how actions lead to consequences, and so draw lessons from the events above. Please be aware that projects can be complex. So the metaphor of a chain of causes and effects is a poor one. Far better is the metaphor of a web of many causes and many effects. Don’t stop your analysis too soon, in the hope of finding simple answers.

• Recommendations
  Ultimately, as we’ll see in the next section, a lessons learned meeting should be a catalyst for change. So, what changes do you recommend, having done your analysis?

Why do You Need Lessons Learned Meetings?

My number one reason for holding lessons learned meetings has very little to do with the project or the organization. It has everything to do with you and your project team.

By taking time to reflect together on your experiences and how your choices led to outcomes, you create learning, development, growth… And, ultimately, wisdom. This is the way professionals develop and so, for me, your LL Meeting is your most effective Continuing Professional Development (CPD) practice.

Driving Change

However, we can also sum up the purpose of a lessons learned meeting as being to drive change. We want to drive change, in:

• your project practices, and those of your immediate colleagues
• the practices of other Project Managers in your organization
• the organization itself – its processes, attitudes, and governance, for example

And, of course, you want to catalyze personal change in individuals; their:

• attitudes
• knowledge
• practices
• behavior

When Should You Hold a Lessons Learned Meeting?

There are two main times you should hold a Lessons Learned meeting; and sometimes a third.

1. End of your project
   At the end of a project to crystallize the impact of all your collective experiences. Always do this.
2. Middle – during your project
   During your project, at regular team meetings, or at key points like stage boundaries. The more often you draw lessons and implement changes, the better your project will perform. So, your target should be to approach continuous improvement, or Kaizen. Do this on any but the shortest projects.
3. Start of your project
   There is often a case to be made for gathering your team at the start of your project, to review lessons learned that can feed into this project. Do this whenever you can.
   Two primary sources will help you:
   1. The experiences team members have had on previous projects
   2. Lessons learned recorded within your organization; particularly those which refer to projects with similarities to yours

Preparation for Your Lessons Learned Meeting

As you’d expect, I always recommend project managers to prepare for important meetings, and here is a stark example. The four areas to focus your preparation are:

1. Input data and information, that will inform your discussions and provide evidence to support or challenge perceptions
2. An agenda that ensures you spend your time together well
3. Logistics, so you can be sure to create the best starting conditions for your meeting
4. Attendance, because having the right people there will give a better result than otherwise

We’ll look at these one at a time.

Gather Data

Before your meeting, gather as much data as you can. This may include:

• Results
• Stakeholder comments
• Schedule performance
• Budget performance
• Resource utilization
• Risk Register
• Change Log
• Feedback and survey results

Please though, do review it before the meeting. It is wise to have all this data available, but wiser still to plan only to present a carefully chosen selection.

For End-of-project LL Meetings

Do also consider doing a survey of team members for their individual Lessons Learned in advance of the meeting. This will allow you to get a fair amount of analysis done before the meeting. Therefore, you will save more of your valuable meeting time for discussion. Here are some simple tools you can use:

• Google Forms (free – and ideal for most uses)
• Survey Monkey (free and paid)
• Typeform (paid – my personal favorite)
• ResponseSuite (paid)

But, for a small project, you can simply email people and ask someone to collate the responses.

Set Your Agenda

You want to keep your lessons learned meeting structured and focused. We’ll look at how to structure it two major sections down.

Logistics

Now for place and time…

Find a Suitable Venue

You want somewhere comfortable, with plenty of whiteboards/flipcharts. And do bring plenty of stationery supplies:

• Markers
• Pens
• Sticky-notes

Consider holding the meeting off-site. Remote conferencing is not ideal – hold it live if you can, but if not, find the best video conferencing tools you can, and, crucially:

Always test and practice using the conferencing tools, before your meeting

Also think about hospitality. It helps to helps relax people and so encourages them to contribute more freely. This also means you’ll need to allow plenty of time, which brings us neatly to…

Set the time 

During your project, lessons learned meetings typically fall either at key points in your project, or at regular project team meetings. But, for post-project reviews, schedule them as soon as possible, while memories are fresh.

By the way, most people think more clearly in the morning, so a morning meeting is ideal. But leave time for people to attend to urgent matters before the meeting starts.

Attendance

Invite your team. Ideally, you will invite anyone who has had a substantial involvement in the project. But, numbers may make this impractical.

Having said this, do you remember my number one reason for holding a lessons learned meeting? I will always want to find some way, if I can, to involve everyone.

So, if my team is too large for an all-hands lessons learned review:

• My less-favored approach is to invite a cross-section of my wider team, with every area represented.
• The approach I prefer is for work-stream leads to run their own work-stream lessons learned meetings, and then send representatives to the ‘whole project’ LL meeting.

Key Roles

There are two key roles to determine:

1. Facilitator (who may not be a part of the project)
   This is the person who will conduct and moderate the discussion. They will be responsible for the process and the outcomes.
2. Rapporteur
   This is the person who will record the discussion and document the conclusions. They would usually take responsibility for drafting any Lessons Learned report that flows from the meeting.

Your Primary Lessons Learned Success Criteria

In the next section, we will review the structure for a successful lessons learned meeting. Before we do that, here are my four primary success factors; the things you need to do to maximise your chances of success.

• Plan and prepare
  I think we’ve covered that, above.
• Focus
  Keep your meeting on agenda, and guillotine circular and off-topic discussions.
• Contributions
  Together, we’re smarter than any one of us. So, make sure you involve everyone – especially the quieter, less assertive members of your team. This will necessarily mean quieting down the contributions of your ‘big talkers’.
• Growth
  Your lessons learned meeting is about helping people to grow professionally and develop greater self-confidence and knowledge. So do not allow the meeting to talk of blame and fault. Stick to understanding, actions, and choices: not personalities. And absolutely stamp out any ad hominem attacks – that is, attacks on people, rather than challenges to their opinions or actions.

How to Structure Your Lessons Learned Meeting

Now it’s time to look at the structure for your meeting. I’ll keep to a simple four stages:

1. Opening
2. Discussion and exploration
3. Drawing Conclusions
4. Closing

Learn More about Meetings

OnlinePMCourses has a sister Channel on YouTube called Management Courses. This offers structure Management training courses as playlists of free YouTube videos. One of our programs is Meetings. Do take a look at the Meetings playlist.

Opening Your Meeting

It makes sense to set the scene with some basic ground rules. But my preference is to avoid that term or say anything that gives the impression that we’re ‘at school’.

Here are some of the things I’d want to cover in an opening round:

• First of all, if people don’t all know one another, do a round of introductions. Some like to make this engaging with a ‘fun fact’: others prefer to keep it simple with just a name and role.
• State the purpose of the meeting. This will be around learning and improvement, so encourage people to be open to sharing. Also, use this slot to address the need to avoid any criticism of people.
• State the outcomes you want from the meeting. We’ll look at some of those below.
• Advocate to keep the meeting positive, and highlight a growth mindset whereby we look for ways to incrementally improve.
• Focus people’s attention on gathering lessons. This means paying attention to actions and behaviors, rather than people.
• Emphasize that everyone has something to contribute.
• I’d also want to recognise special circumstances and exceptional achievements, as a way of setting a positive frame for the meeting.

Discussion and Exploration

The first of the two main parts of the meeting is where you will identify and explore the themes for your lessons learned.

Here are some examples of how you can organize your discussion. You can do so, by…

• theme: people, process, technology
• workstream
• project stage
• functional specialism
• PM knowledge area or project discipline

Drawing Conclusions

This is where you will refine the lessons you identified in the last section, and prioritize them, so that those with a lesser impact do not distract from the big-ticket lessons.

I like to use a consensus approach (such as voting) to prioritize. Then work together to articulate:

• the lesson learned
• actions that flow from it
• responsibilities for follow-up actions

Closing Your Meeting

Before the meeting ends, be sure to allocate responsibilities for follow-up actions.

When you have done that and people have accepted their responsibilities, thank everyone at the end

Facilitation Tools for Your Lessons Learned Meeting

Getting the best from the people in your meeting will need some skilled facilitation. We may consider a future article on facilitation tools but for the time being, I’ll refer you to the playlist for the Management Courses Meetings course.

But for our purposes here, let’s just briefly survey a few of the most valuable tools, which project managers commonly use in this kind of meeting.

Gathering Input

The first set of tools helps in gathering ideas, opinions, and commentary.

• Use Round-robin approach to ensure everyone has a say
  This means, simply, going around the room and asking each person in turn. It is a simple, effective way to ensure everyone makes their contribution. If someone has nothing to add, let them say so.
• For a big team, try a Brain-writing approach
  In this approach,everyone puts their ideas onto a card – one idea per card. In a second round, people pick up random cards, read them, and add their commentary. This can go into multiple rounds and allows a very large group to operate in parallel to generate and assess a lot of ideas in a short time.
• Mad, Sad, Glad, Add
  Put up blank posters labeled: Mad, Sad, Glad, and Add. Everyone creates sticky notes with their ideas for what:
  • Makes them angry and they want to stop
  • Upsets them and they want to stop
  • Pleases them and they want to continue or do more
  • They noted was missing and they want to continue
• A similar approach is Stop, Start, Continue
• Open and probing questions
  Good questions are at the heart of effective facilitation. Use open questions to elicit ideas, and probing questions to refine them, understand them, and test them out.

Meeting Facilitation Questions

The two primary questions for gathering input are:

• What can we learn from what went well?
  (Or what went well, and what can we learn from that?
• What can we learn from the things that did not go well?
  (Or what went badly, and what can we learn from that?)

When we later come to tools for summarising and prioritizing, the primary questions for eliciting summary conclusions are: 

So, what…

• would we do the same next time?
• would we do differently next time?
• does the wider organization need to know and do?

Example Facilitation Questions

We recommend you prepare a small number of carefully chosen questions. If you ask too many, the same things will come up over and over again. Chose the questions you think have the best chance to surface the most important points quickly and positively.

Open, Starting Questions

To what extent were the project goals and objectives attained?

And then let’s explore the big outcomes from your project. What…

1. was your schedule performance?
2. was your budget performance?
3. went well?  Provide examples of successes that happened during or because of the project
4. didn’t go well?  Discuss unintended outcomes that happened during or because of the project
5. might have been better handled if done differently?
6. would you recommend to others who might be involved in future projects of a similar type?
7. obstacles got in your way?
8. was beyond your control?
9. surprised you on the project that were not planned?
10. did you anticipate happening that did not happen?
11. mistakes did you successfully avoid making?
12. could you automate or simplify that you do repetitively?
13. skills did you need that were missing on this project?

Probing Follow-up Questions

Now let’s probe into the different areas you can make things even better next time. So, how…

1. effectively did you identify, bring-in, and deploy your project resources?
2. well did we define roles and responsibilities?
3. well did you plan the project?
4. effectively did you engage with stakeholders?
5. did your project communications work?
6. effective was governance?
7. did the PM lead the team?
8. well did our risk and issue management work?
9. effectively did you work together as a team?
10. effective was the way you integrated the project into the host environment?
11. well did you handle the soft change aspects of our project?
12. robust was your testing regime?

Action Steps

What can you do next time to improve your…

1. governance
2. scope management
3. risk management
4. stakeholder engagement
5. project communications and reporting
6. problem-solving and issue management
7. planning, scheduling, and schedule management
8. budgeting and cost management
9. benefits management
10. pilot or prototype process
11. quality design, control, and assurance
12. testing and remediation
13. resource deployment
14. procurement
15. contractor management
16. change control
17. project integration
18. close-down

Coming to Conclusions

Here is my two favorite process for sorting and prioritizing your ideas.

1. Affinity Mapping
   This involves placing all the ideas on a chart and then clustering or linking those that are similar or related. It’s a way of reducing a huge number of detailed lessons into a smaller number of big lesson themes.
2. Consensus tools to prioritize your ideas
   Always do this after you have grouped and reduced the ideas, or it will not produce good results. Use one of these techniques to prioritize:
   1. Sticker voting
      Give everyone from 3 to 10 small stickers and ask them to use them to indicate their top priorities. A variant is to allow more than one sticker on a person’s top priorities. In this case, they’ll need 5-10 each. Or just give them one to five stickers and ask them to indicate their top picks. Small colored sticky dots work well.
   2. Forced ranking
      Ask people to put their top three or top five ideas in order, and assign points (say 5 pts for #1, 2 pts for #2, and 1 pt for #3). Think through a suitable scoring method before you facilitate the session.

Lessons Learned Meeting Outcomes

There are four outcomes your Lessons Learned meeting should be aiming for:

1. Enhancing the professional experience, expertise, competence, and confidence of those attending
2. Beneficial recommendations for future projects that you, your colleagues, or your organization will undertake
3. Setting up the knowledge to avoid problems for these future projects
4. Establishing good practices for your wider organization

This might sound a bit ‘meta’ (turtles standing on bigger turtles)… After you’ve carried out your Lessons Learned review, take some time to reflect on it (maybe with one or two close colleagues). What did you learn from the process, and how can you improve it next time?

Lessons Learned Meeting Follow-up

The last step for any meeting is the follow-up. And it’s every bit as important as the meeting itself. So, you’ll need to:

1. Document your lessons learned.
   Include:
   1. Good practice recommendations
   2. Action points
   3. Don’t forget to emphasize the positives
2. Circulate your document to the team.
3. Follow-up on actions that you allocated at the end of the meeting.
4. Brief your sponsor and the governance tier of your project.
5. Also, circulate it more widely
   And add to our organization’s internal Project Management Body of Knowledge. You may want to recommend or make changes to processes, tools, or templates.
6. Speak with, and share what you’ve learned with, other Project Managers.
   Not only does this help disseminate good ideas; but it also helps embed the learning in your mind.
7. Look for opportunities to present your lessons learned in meetings within and outside your organization.
   In the latter case, if you are outside your organization, do be careful to anonymize information and ensure that nothing you say breaches confidentiality or data protection guidelines and good practices.

A Simple Lessons Learned Maturity Model

Our purpose in this article has been to give you a guide about how to conduct a good Lessons Learned Meeting. So a full discussion of the different ways they can feature in an organization’s process is well-outside of our scope.

But I would like to end with a short overview of the different levels of maturity that organizations show, in the way they approach Lessons Learned. It’s a simple five-level model, and I hope it may point your way to ‘where next?’ for you and your organization.

Level zero (Failing)

Organizations don’t hold lessons learned meetings, and they don’t learn lessons. As a result, they constantly repeat the mistakes of the past. D’oh!

Level 1 (Ad hoc)

Organizations hold ad hoc lessons learned meetings, often figuring out the process afresh each time. The resulting lessons learned partially affect future actions.

Level 2 (Good)

Organizations have a defined process for holding lessons learned reviews. They execute them regularly, and Lessons Learned are stored and disseminated throughout the organization. There is accountability to ensure that people act on their recommendations.

Level 3 (Very Good)

Here, we see systemic use of lessons learned for continuous organizational improvement.

Level 4 (Fully Mature)

Lessons Learned feed into organizational governance and reporting. The organization develops robust dashboards and metrics to draw on and track the impact of their learning.

What is your experience of Lessons Learned Meetings?

I’d love to hear your experiences and opinions. Come to think of it, I’d also love to read about your biggest lessons learned! If you share them in the comments section below, I will be sure to respond.

My Lessons Learned

If you are interested in my lessons learned, we have two articles that discuss these.

General Project Management Lessons

Here’s an article on ‘Ten Project Management Lessons I’ve Learned over the Years’.

What I Learned from Building this OnlinePMCourses Business

Here I reflect on the project management lessons I learned from building this site and the business it supports: ‘Building an Online Business: Project Management Lessons’.