Lessons Learned workshop.
Attendees: project manager, two testers, one developer, and the project office coordinator, taking minutes.
Apologies: the sponsor, three of the four Steering Committee members, the business lead, and the vendor’s account manager.
Not invited: everybody else.
The workshop was held, the minutes exist, and the box on the project closure checklist can be ticked.
Somebody will ask for proof one day, an auditor or a quality manager, and the proof will be there. What the minutes will not show is whether the workshop changed anything.
And with that attendance list, it did not.
The Morning After
Picture a restaurant that takes on a big one-off job. A company dinner for a hundred and twenty guests, three courses, speeches in between.
The owner sold the evening and agreed the price. The head chef designed the menu and ordered the fish. The client’s event planner set the timing of the speeches.
On the night, the starters went out late, the speeches ran an hour over, the main course went cold waiting for them, and the fish ran out at table nine.
The owner promised the client an evaluation. So the next morning at eleven, there is one.
Around the table sit the sous-chef who ran the pass, two waiters, and the dishwasher. The owner is at the bank. The head chef is sleeping in. The client’s event planner was never invited, because the evaluation is a kitchen matter. Nobody thought of the fish supplier at all.
They do their honest best with what they can see. Warm the plates earlier. Put more staff on the pass. Start the dessert before the coffee. The sous-chef writes it all down and pins it to the kitchen wall.
None of it is wrong. None of it touches the price, the menu, the fish order, or the speeches.
The People Who Were Not There
A lessons learned workshop needs two kinds of people. Those best placed to explain what happened, and those who benefit most from hearing it. On a project, both are the same group: the people with the most influence on how it ran. The Steering Committee members, the other major stakeholders, and everybody with a leading role in the team.
They are also the people who made the decisions this blog is about. The budget that was approved instead of the budget that was needed. The scope that was never cut. The risk that was written down and never paid for. If they did not cause the mistake, they were the ones in a position to stop it.
And they are almost never in the room.
Sometimes they are not even invited, because the workshop is seen as an internal team event. More often they are invited and decline. Not out of malice. The most powerful people in an organization are also the busiest, and the busiest have to prioritize. Guess which meeting ends up at the bottom of the list. The one about a project that is already finished, for a product that has already been delivered.
So the workshop is led by the project manager and attended by whoever is still on the project. The leftovers.
Teams with an Agile background are often good at this, on their own level. Every sprint ends with a retrospective, and the team gets better at working as a team. What a retrospective cannot fix are the decisions made above the team. Those need the people who made them.
Who Does the Dishes
None of this requires a new process. It requires a few decisions, taken before the project ends instead of after.
Put it on the Steering Committee’s agenda. Hold the session as part of the last Steering Committee meeting, or straight after it, while the committee still exists. A committee that has already been dissolved does not come back for a workshop.
Make it a condition for closing the project. The project is not formally closed, and the budget is not released, until the session has taken place with the people who steered it.
Hold it while memories are fresh. Within weeks of go-live, not months later when half the team has moved on.
Ask about decisions, not just execution. “What went wrong in the team?” gets you warm plates. “Which decisions would we take differently?” gets you the fish order and the speeches. That second question can only be answered by the people who took the decisions.
Give every lesson an owner and a destination. A lesson that ends up in a folder is a note on the kitchen wall. A lesson handed to the sponsor of the next project is a lesson.
Keep the session short if that is what it takes. Senior people will give an hour to a sharp agenda far more easily than a day to an open one.
A few weeks later, the same restaurant books its next company dinner. A hundred and fifty guests this time. Same menu, same fish order, and the speeches scheduled between the starters and the main course.
In the kitchen, the notes are still pinned to the wall.
The plates were warm.
The fish ran out at table seven.