Your guide to lessons learned in project management
By KaroBek Team • Last updated: May 2025
What are lessons learned in project management?
The lessons learned process is essential for capturing insights gained through a project to improve performance and outcomes. Rather than being treated as a routine administrative task, it should be an ongoing practice incorporated throughout all phases of the project. By recognising what worked well and identifying where difficulties occurred, project teams can improve practices, avoid repeating past mistakes and improve project performance. This proactive approach drives continuous improvement within the organisation and benefits all future projects.
Why are lessons learned crucial for projects?
Better projects
Incorporating lessons learned in project management directly strengthens how future projects are planned and executed. It gives project teams a clear understanding of past successes and challenges, enabling them to make more informed decisions. This leads to effective planning, including the early identification of potential risks and the ability to apply proven mitigation strategies based on prior experience. As a result, this proactive approach helps to minimise costly setbacks and increases the likelihood of delivering projects on time, within budget, and to the required scope, ultimately achieving stronger overall project performance.
Knowledge preservation
Lessons learned in project management play a critical role in preserving organisational memory. At the completion of projects, teams are often disbanded, with members moving to other projects or leaving the organisation. Without a formal process in place, valuable experiences are easily lost. A robust lessons learned system ensures that this knowledge endures, enabling new team members to build on past achievements rather than starting from scratch.
Knowledge sharing
An effective lessons learned system allows knowledge to flow between project teams and throughout the organisation. This helps teams make better decisions, breaks down barriers, fosters a shared sense of purpose, and ensures that each project benefits from collective experience.
Overview of lessons learned
Prepare and identify
At the start of the project, clearly communicate the systems and processes that will be used to capture lessons learned. Select user-friendly tools that make it easy for team members to record experiences. Integrate lessons learned activities into the project schedule and actively encourage contributions from all team members.
The identification of lessons learned is a continuous process that should be pursued throughout the entire project lifecycle. Project team should proactively capture and document lessons, encompassing both successes and challenges as they arise.
Lessons can be identified at key milestones or at the conclusion of each project phase. These interim reviews allow the project team to analyse what went well, what didn't, and why, enabling course correction and improvements to be applied to subsequent phases of the current project.
Finally, lessons learned review meetings are conducted at project closure. These sessions consolidate previously identified lessons and undertake a holistic review of the entire project.
Document
Documenting lessons is a critical step to ensure they are preserved accurately and can be utilised when needed. As memories fade and team members transition, well-documented lessons serve as a reliable record of project experiences.
Effective documentation should aim for clarity and completeness. It typically involves capturing not just what went well or what could be done better, but also the surrounding context, the impact (or potential impact) of the event, recommendations for improvement for future projects, and any immediate actions taken.
To maintain consistency and facilitate easier analysis later, organisations should utilise standardised templates or formats for documenting lessons learned.
Analyse
Analysing lessons helps reveal patterns, root causes behind successes and failures, and opportunities for improvement. How this analysis is approached can vary between organisations. For instance, the project team might perform immediate, project-specific analysis, while a dedicated continuous improvement team or a central PMO might be responsible for broader, organisational level analysis that identifies cross-project trends and improvements.
Lessons can be analysed at different levels and this can include:
- Individual Lesson Analysis: Immediately after documenting a specific lesson (or as part of finalising its documentation), a deeper dive can uncover its root causes (e.g., using the ‘Five Whys’) and formulate specific recommendations related to that event. This enriches the individual lesson record making it more valuable for future projects addressing similar situations.
- Cross project analysis: Periodic analysis can be conducted by leveraging well-documented and consistently formatted lessons stored over time from different projects. This can involve:
- Identifying recurring patterns, common themes, significant issues, or notable successes across multiple projects.
- Performing root cause analysis on trends.
- Developing overarching recommendations for process improvements, policy changes, updates to templates or standards, training needs and other system and organisational improvements.
Storing and retrieving lessons
A significant challenge in maximising the value of lessons learned is ensuring they are stored and retrieved effectively. Without a robust system, valuable lessons documented from past projects can easily become buried in shared drives or inaccessible repositories, rendering them useless. One way of overcoming this is a centralised lessons learned repository and accompanying system that is easily accessible by project teams.
The system should make it straightforward to input new lessons
using standardised formats and templates, so that they are stored in a consistent way and are easy to retrieve and analyse. The retrieval from the lessons learned system should be facilitated by strong search functionality, enabling project teams to quickly locate relevant information when they need it.
Project teams are encouraged to proactively consult the lessons learned repository at the initiation of a new project and at key milestones or phase transitions. When project teams know they can reliably access and trust past insights, their engagement with the entire lessons learned process increases significantly.
A well-managed storage and retrieval process contributes directly to reducing project risks and improving the overall likelihood of success for future initiatives, transforming documented lessons into drivers of continuous improvement.
Conclusion - Make every project a stepping stone to greater success
A commitment to lessons learned in project management provides real, practical benefits for any organisation. This builds organisational capability by improving processes, avoiding the repetition of past mistakes, fostering better communication that breaks down silos, and enabling the replication of successful strategies. Ultimately, these improvements lead to increased project performance across the organisation.
Enable smarter project delivery with KaroBek
KaroBek is a lessons learned platform built for project teams. It helps teams document, store, and share learnings, ensuring every project benefits from past experience. Start building a culture of continuous improvement with KaroBek.