The Virtual Project Management Office

  Chapter 10

LESSONS LEARNED AND BEST PRACTICES

Lessons learned are the shared knowledge that allows project managers and the organization to grow and projects to mature. A well-developed project management methodology has as a part of its closing process lessons learned. In fact, PMI’s PMBOK^® Guide (2008) states that lessons learned should be done as a part of the closing process group, processes that are done every time a management group ends. Beyond this, lessons learned should be collected throughout the life of a project.

Lessons learned are the lifeblood of a PMO—and this is even truer in a VPMO, though it is difficult to coordinate the collections of lessons learned and maintain them on a distributed/virtual project. Because in-person ...