Speaker Abstract and Bio

This lecture and course was developed to support practicing project managers in their lessons learned activities, and to fill the void of lessons learned best practices. The author perceives a void in lessons learned best practices, because upon research she found the topic referenced in the most cited project management literature as follows:

• The PMBOK states that lessons learned should be gathered at the end of the project phases and reviewed during planning.
• OPM3 mentions lessons learned at a high level.
• Prince 2 states that lessons learned should be captured in a log and published in a collated report.
• Finally, PMI recently published the Post-Project Reviews to Gain Effective Lessons Learned book which contains an assortment of data regarding the importance of a robust lessons learned practice, and statistics on how organizations learn and why it's difficult to capture and leverage lessons learned.

While all of the above mentioned publications are useful, they don't provide a practical, how-to guide for capturing and leveraging lessons learned. The theme of this lecture is "do it early, do it often." The participant learns lesson learned specific activities for every phase of the project life-cycle. He or she is encouraged to abandon the "post syndrome" of addressing lessons learned only after the fact, i.e. at the end of a project phase or the end of the project.