ABSTRACT
The discipline of project Lessons Learned is important for a number of reasons: it contributes to a continuous process improvement environment in project organizations; increases the knowledge base of project teams; positively influences the total cost or timing of projects going forward; and improves quality. Capturing, documenting, and sharing project Lessons Learned is a valuable exercise in every project group, because it forces the project community to reflect on its outcomes versus actions and behaviors in project team situations. Project managers who fully experience the project process learn and acquire truth, knowledge, decision-making skills, and good judgment. Many companies have begun to take project Lessons Learned more seriously and are interested in closing-out projects with documentation, preserving the knowledge created by the project and the experiences of project participants. A lesson learned can then be documented in terms of the risk of the new technology being proved out successfully during the project.
