There is a lot of talk in the project management community about how difficult it is to learn from project management.
Actually, it’s not.
It is easy to learn from mistakes. It is very difficult to find useful lessons that you can use in your current projects.
The problem lies in the ‘learning’ portion of lessons learned. Organizations don’t learn, and often don’t have the structure or tools to do so.
What if there were a way to find the right lessons at just the right moment? Instead of searching through minutes from meetings about lessons learned, how about a wiki or database?
Now there is. The world of project management knowledge sharing has changed.
Software To The Rescue: Lessons Learned
How to Create a Project
Creating a Lesson
Sharing Lessons Learned
Tracking Lessons Learned Actions
Finding Lessons
Setting user permissions
CornerThought Review Summary
Software To The Rescue: Lessons Learned
Regular readers will know that I review many project management software tools. Sometimes, I think I’ve seen everything! CornerThought was a new tool that I hadn’t seen before. CornerThought was a tool that changed the way I think about databases of lessons learned.
This is a win-win situation for algorithms! Let me explain.
CornerThought has created software that allows you organize the lessons learned during a project. Logging in will show you the most relevant lessons to your current project and where you are at the moment.
You might say that you are in the execution phase of an oil and gas project. The tool will show you the lessons learned from similar oil and gas projects if you tell it that.
There’s no need to search or guess at what other teams have tagged their lessons. It’s all there and it’s organized.
How to Create a Project
Let’s now dive into my CornerThought review. The software’s ability to automatically determine who is involved, where they are located, and all the rest is still a learning process. It is important to seed it with data before it can start. This can be done by creating a project.
Create a new project and then add the meta information. This is the set parameters that defines the project’s scope. Here are some examples:
Suppliers/Contractors used
Client
Localization
Budget
Duration
You can go on and on. You can customize the parameters to your liking.
Next, create your project and add lessons learned. Finally, add tasks to the project. This seemed like a lot of overhead. It’s a hassle to keep a Gantt chart in project management software, and another one in here. It’s actually not difficult. It’s all about standard project management processes.
“Tasks” are generic and can include things like:
Change management
Budget management
Risk management
Engineering
Scheduling
This is stuff.
Next, add people to the tasks: Marcela does scheduling, Fred does risk management. You don’t need to go into detail beyond that. This is to ensure Fred logs in and sees the risk management lessons.
It comes with standard tasks and processes that are very similar to the PMBOK (r) Guide – Sixth Edition knowledge areas. This text still shapes the way PMI certified practitioners do what they do.
Importing categories from other projects is possible, so you only need to set it up once and then the bulk of the work is done.
CornerThought allows you to add categories of lessons learned manually or import them.
You’ve had your lessons learned meeting. Now you want to record the lesson. Next, what?
CornerThought’s lessons learned software allows you to categorize a lesson either as an issue (be on the lookout for it next time), or as a success (do what you did last time).
You can do it:
It’s okay to log multiple causes
The KPIs and impacts. You can also assign a “criticality” to show how an issue affected the project, e.g. In terms of cost
The description
Learning itself
The