ABSTRACT
Evaluation is the determination of Merit (quality), Worth (value), or Signicance (importance). Since the dawn of humans, evaluation has been in use. People have used evaluation to prove and make judgments. People have used Lessons Learned (LL) as a tool of evaluation and a means of storytelling. ese stories have been used to
• Document results or determine accountability (summative) • Improve things for the future or determine other options (formative)
LL involves engaging evaluation in projects at a tactical and strategic level. e context of LL can be seen throughout history, even in many ancient writings, such as the Dead Sea scrolls. Over the past four hundred years, the concept of Project Evaluation (PE) can be credited to pioneers such as Francis Bacon. In 1620, Bacon was conducting evaluations and involved with projects. e scientic method he designed was hypothesisexperiment-evaluation and plan-do-check. ree hundred years later, in the early 1900s, Walter Andrew Shewhart extended the plan-do-check to plan-do-check-act. In the 1920s, Gantt charts were introduced by Henry Laurence Gantt to visually display scheduled and actual progress in parts of projects. By the late 1950s, the Critical Path Method (CPM) was introduced by DuPont and Remington Rand Univac to coordinate complex plant maintenance projects (Fabac, 2006).
