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Lessons Learned

glossary

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned is a term that originated in project management. It defines the acquisition of knowledge and skills, which are acquired during practical work on projects and are also documented afterwards. The goal is to learn from experience and mistakes in order to be able to use this knowledge better in the future.

This usually happens in three phases:

  1. Lessons Identified:
    Identifying the problems, plans and errors
  2. Lessons Analyzed:
    Analyzing these findings. Why did that not work? Under what conditions did it not work?
  3. Lessons Learned:
    To learn from the situation and to document it so that other people concerned are not confronted with the same situation in the future.

Documenting the lessons learned is best done in the form of checklists, elaborated document templates, such as quality management reports or software tools that support the project process step by step.

At a certain point in time, these experiences should then be brought together, identified and analyzed. This works for example in the project review, i.e. after the completion of a process or project, or in the retrospective perspective, when a sprint in Scrum has been performed.