Lessons learned – the classic oxymoron

There’s plenty of advice around about how Project Managers and their teams should behave, so what could we say that would add to the sum total of it? For a start, we could distil decades of lessons from project reviews and audits. If one thing is clear, it’s that people don’t always learn the lessons. Our first piece of advice then is that you should start with these lessons and see if they resonate with your own experiences and feel for what makes sense. If you agree, our second piece of advice is to ensure they are hardwired into your processes and write them into your procedures. Unless they become an integral part of the normal way of working then they won’t make the slightest bit of difference.