Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success

Benefits of Leveraging Lessons Learned

A look at the major project management frameworks will reveal a common attitude toward lessons learned. For each of its 22 process areas, for example, CMMI recommends periodic involvement by upper-level management to understand and review how things are going. The PMBOK supports the practice of postmortems, lessons learned sessions held by the team at the end of a project to assess performance and quality. ISO 9001:2000 requires procedures to support continuous improvement, including examinations of past performance weighed against objectives and targets. Whether a shop chooses one of these three frameworks or designs its own lessons learned approach, the resultant benefits are likely to be the same. It’s ...