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Essentially a project is a temporary organisation with staff drawn from different organisations, departments and skill bases to undertake an ad-hoc task. When that task is finished without a process in place to manage it, the knowledge and experience accrued by the project team disperses with team members on project closure. During the project lifecycle, further dispersion of the knowledge occurs through the churn of personnel arising from changes in resource need, changes in responsibilities, career moves and promotions. Indeed it is often the case that few of the team in place at project closure were involved in the project initiation. The implication is that without formal measures to acquire and promote the lessons learned during the project, the knowledge will be lost or dispersed on or before project closure.

Successful project delivery organisations are learning organisations. They systematically apply the lessons learnt from today's projects to improve the delivery of tomorrow's projects. The current high level of project failure suggests that few organisations can currently be described as learning organisations.

What is a learning organisation?

A learning organisation can be defined as one which adapts to its external environment, continually enhancing its delivery capability, developing collective as well as individual knowledge and applying the results of its learning to improve performance.

This requires the organisation to have a knowledge management process comprising four basic types of activity:

• Knowledge Creation - the identification, collection, combination and refinement of lessons learned to create reusable knowledge;
• Knowledge Storage - the organisation, categorisation and retrieval processes to allow access to the created knowledge;
• Knowledge Distribution - the publication mechanisms for making the knowledge available both within and outside the source project; and
• Knowledge Utilisation - the integration of the knowledge into decision and review processes, and its application to other projects.

At a high-level the project management community provides knowledge management through the creation of standard methodologies and bodies of knowledge, for example the PRINCE2™ methodology provides guidance on a generic project management framework.  However this high-level knowledge evolves quite slowly, in the case of PRINCE2™ through the gradual revision of documentation. The generic nature of the guidance also means that specific sector, technology and process knowledge must be applied to achieve successful project delivery.

Whilst the existence and use of this high-level knowledge can contribute to successful project delivery, there were successful projects before these modern methodologies were created. Research suggests that despite the existence of these methodologies, the level of project failure has not significantly reduced over the last decade. If project managers are to reduce the level of project failures, the lessons need to be learned and applied from the current projects.

How can we relate learning to project management?

Project management encompasses the disciplines required to implement a problem solving process, it also incorporates the four steps in the PDCA or Deming cycle:

• Plan - establish the objectives and processes necessary to deliver the results in accordance with the expected outputs, i.e. create a Project Plan to implement an agreed solution to realise specific benefits;
• Do - implement the plan, deliver the work and realise the benefits;
• Check - measure progress, checking the implementation and benefits against the plan to ascertain any differences;
• Act - analyse any differences, establish their cause, and plan follow-up action as necessary.

Project managers will recognise that in any project the PDCA cycle operates at a variety of levels, for example the entire project can represent a single PDCA cycle, and in structured project management methodologies, e.g. PRINCE2™, the individual stages can be represented as a PDCA cycle, feeding outcomes and analysis back into the overall project lifecycle.

From his examination of many organisations, John Seddon (a leading service delivery consultant) concluded that if you look at any traditional organisation as a system you find a multitude of forces working against its purpose. A feature that he identifies in these organisations is their inability to tackle ‘failure demand', i.e. to look at and address the causes of failure. In project organisations a lack of knowledge about ‘failure demand' and its causes will contribute to cost and schedule overruns.

A cause of delay in some projects is the late sign-off of key project documents due to overruns in the drafting of the documents, typically due to the need for additional revisions. A learning organisation might examine the feedback and operation of it project document review process to identify any common causes of failure and then take steps to ensure adherence to agreed review timetables and to reduce the document rework cycle. These measures are only possible if data is collected and analysed on the cases of such delays.

Creating a learning project organisation

A first step in creating a learning project organisation is to ensure that the project lifecycle includes regular points at which learning can be derived from the project. Without this capability in place, the project does not have a mechanism in place to capture knowledge as the basis for future learning.

The generic project lifecycle below illustrates how a series of lessons learned activities can run in parallel with the delivery activities.

These learning activities start with the creation of a Lessons Learned Log at the beginning of the project. The use of such logging and reporting is an established concept, for example the content and purpose of a Lessons Learned Reports is defined in the PRINCE2™ product descriptions.

As the project progresses through the lifecycle the project team can add lessons learned to the Log on an ad-hoc basis. Thus for example the project team might raise items to add to the Log associated with risks, issues, exception reports, and to capture information about things which have gone well or gone badly.

Whilst this ad-hoc collection is an important step, project learning also needs to be supported by a systematic approach involving the collection of inputs from end-of-stage Lessons Learned Review. In our experience best value is achieved if the lessons learned are derived from a formal situation review which examines the state of the project as it prepares to transition between project stages. This approach has the benefit of both providing assurance on the state of the project and allowing knowledge to be captured before it gets forgotten due to passage of time or personnel churn. In addition it offers the opportunity to review current project performance against the performance of previous projects and statistically compare the delivery status.   

Conclusion

Implementing an effective lessons learned process is a key component of the knowledge management required to create a learning project organisation. As we noted in our earlier article, an NAO report reveals that two-thirds of UK Government departments do not have a formal requirement in place to search for relevant knowledge, skills and experience at the outset of a project/programme. A requirement to examine relevant knowledge and experience is part of the best practice captured in the PRINCE2™ methodology. The use of lessons learned from previous projects is a primary driver for continuous performance improvement in project delivery, an important factor if we are to reduce the level of project failure.

A future article will explore the processes and structures needed to harness the lessons learned to create project learning.