How to Conduct a Lessons Learned Workshop
Overview:
This guide is for project or operations teams that are either completing a project/operation or hitting a major milestone and want to conduct an after-action review. It should be noted that this guide is for teams or organizations who do not use CornerThought's full lessons learned process and are simply looking for a quick process for assessing the lessons learned of a given project or operation. This approach differs from CornerThought’s full-scale lesson’s learned process which we deploy throughout an entire project/operation by collecting data in real time. Contact us directly or through our website www.getcornerthought.com to inquire about all our services.
The form we use to capture lessons learned from your team is the CornerThought Lessons Learned Template. This document explains how to collect and analyze the data, as well as how to facilitate your lessons learned workshop.
Our Approach:
Team members can fill out no more than 5 forms describing either issues or successes they observed on the project/operation
Team members are not limited on what topics they choose to bring up:
Team members can bring up only issues, only successes, or any combination of the 2
Team members can bring up specific events that occurred, or their own general observations
Examples of specific events: “A gas leak was detected during the commissioning phase of the project (issue)”; “The compressor arrived onsite ahead of schedule (success)”
Examples of general observations: “Materials consistently arrived onsite damaged throughout the project (issue)”; “Regulatory approval submittals required minimal revisions or public dispute negotiations (success)”
Why We Chose this Approach:
We want to encourage full transparency. We also want to focus on noteworthy one-off incidents that occurred and must be assessed, or general aspects of the project/operation that contributed to its success or failure.
By limiting the number of entries to only 5 per team member, individuals tend to focus on either key events that should be addressed, or important positive/negative aspects of the project/operation that standout to them.
If we were to leave the number of entries open-ended, team members often get overwhelmed with how many items they should submit and may either submit only one or two overly generic items or too many specific items to be addressed in a limited timeframe.
We allow team members to submit either positive or negative, general or specific items as we want to encourage full honesty and not force them to give inauthentic feedback. For instance, we don't want to force team members to give a positive aspect of a project if they feel that the project was ultimately a failure.
The Lessons Learned Process
Step 1: Collect and analyze the data from the submitted forms
Once all the forms are collected, the feedback should be analyzed to find if any of the following is true:
Are team members consistently bringing up specific issues/successes?
Are team members consistently bringing up general issues/successes?
Are there any issues/successes that had a major impact on the project/operation?
Is there an overall theme to the issues/successes brought up (e.g. safety, cost management, regulatory, etc.)?
Are there any links between issues/successes (i.e. cause and effect)?
*CornerThought can conduct the above analysis to save you the headache of doing it in-house. Contact us directly or through our website www.getcornerthought.com to inquire about all our services.
Step 2: Decide on how you want to setup workshops
After you’ve completed the analysis, you’ll need to setup workshops. Depending on the type of feedback you’ve received, you may need to have one or two meetings with management and a select group of team members, or multiple workshops with individual delivery teams. The approach you should take:
If there were specific issues/successes (i.e. specific events that affected certain tasks, departments, delivery teams) that were consistently brought up, or which had a major impact, you should setup individual workshops with the delivery teams that were affected
If there were general issues/successes consistently brought up, or which had a major impact, you should discuss those with management and a handful of team members who brought those items up
As a guideline, bring in 3 team members who brought up the same general issues/successes to help add context to their response
Step 3: Setup workshops with managers and individual delivery teams
Setting up workshops will be dependent on the availability of your team members. You may be restricted to only a single short meeting, or you may have the ability to carry out multiple long workshops. For each scenario, use the following guideline:
For meetings less than 2 hours:
Narrow down to top 5 issues/successes to discuss
For meetings of 2-4 hours:
Narrow down to top 10 issues/successes to discuss
*CornerThought can assist your team in setting up workshops and help you determine what topics to focus on. Contact us directly or through our website www.getcornerthought.com to inquire about all our services.
Step 4: Carry out the workshop(s)
We use the following model for defining lessons learned:
The focus of the lessons learned workshop should be on identifying and assessing the causes and impacts, and defining future considerations and action items to address those causes and impacts. For details on how to define future considerations or action items, see CornerThought Lessons Learned Template.
The workshop should prioritize issues over successes if time is restricted. The workshop should also prioritize defining action items over future considerations.
*CornerThought can facilitate your lessons learned workshop(s) using the best practices we’ve developed over years, ensuring unbiased and structured meetings. Contact us directly or through our website www.getcornerthought.com to inquire about all our services.
What else CornerThought can do for you
We know one of the main issues with lessons learned is putting them into a format that people will actually read, which doesn’t reveal any sensitive information. The other issue is making lessons learned easy to find for future teams doing similar projects or operations. That’s why we can:
Write up your lessons learned report after the workshops are completed
Create metadata based on the scope of your project/operations, as well as the content of your lessons learned, to make your lessons learned more searchable
Comments