Lessons learned meeting is a great way to find
out what's working well
and not working well on your project,
and in this video, we're going to learn how to do just that,
how to create a lessons learned meeting.
And if you really want to master your next project
stay tuned to the end of this video, 'cause I'm going to
share with you how you can get your hands on my cheat sheet
on how and why projects fail and how to stop that.
Hi, if you're new here, welcome.
My name is Adriana Girdler and you landed on the best
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Now, if you want to learn more on how to do
a lessons learned meeting and facilitate it really well,
let's get to it.
Keep the purpose in mind.
Now, before we get into this,
I just want you to be aware of that.
Lessons learned does have alternative names.
Some of those names are AAR, After Action Review,
postmortems, insight meetings, key takeaways meetings,
just to name a few.
If you are wondering what exactly is lesson learned,
you may have heard it in a different context,
but it's still all the same.
So, it's really important to understand the purpose
of lessons learned, particularly when you're doing it
in a meeting, 'cause all meetings should have a purpose,
and really the key purpose of a lessons learned
is to understand what worked well, didn't work well
in your project, and that could be really any stage
of the project.
You want to take those key takeaways and you want to ensure
that you're either moving forward in the right direction
at the next stage in your project, or at the end
of the project, you're collecting that information,
so for a future project, you can take those lessons learned.
The real cool thing about lessons learned,
in my personal opinion, is that it brings about
a lot of collaboration,
and people have the ability to speak up
and let you know and to have it documented, what worked well
and didn't work well, so that they can bring that
up again themselves in a future project,
whether it's with you or another project manager.
When to run a lessons learned meeting.
Now, I kind of touched upon it in the first tip,
but I'm really gonna lay it out here.
There's three specific times you want to consider
a lessons learned.
You don't have to do all three, but it doesn't hurt.
So, the first one is at a beginning of a project.
You want to see if there's any projects
in the past that are very similar in scope
or similar in regards to team members,
and you want to see if you can pull up on those past AARs
to see what you can learn from.
Is there anything there that worked really well
that maybe we should incorporate into our project?
And is there something specifically that didn't
that we should stay well away from?
And what a nice way to do it at the beginning
of the project, really setting yourself up for success.
The second way you want to consider a lessons learned
is in the middle of your project.
Again, lessons learned postmortems aren't just for the end.
You can do it in the middle.
Perhaps something occurred that did not go well at all.
Maybe something happened and maybe someone
unfortunately made a mistake, which had big repercussions.
Look that can be really difficult.
So, what is a good technique is to do a lessons learned
on that particular item.
Takes away the emotional charge 'cause you're setting it up
for the facts versus any personal opinion
or getting upset 'cause something got derailed.
That's a really good opportunity to bring it in,
in the middle of the project.
Another good opportunity to bring it in,
in the middle of the project is when you go
to different stages within your project.
So, you can really take these little mini looks
at a certain section, a certain stage
before you move on to the next one.
Now, the third time, or the third opportunity
to bring in a lessons learned is at the end of your project.
Bring everyone together.
make it a celebratory lessons learned meeting, by the way.
Throw in some lunch, have everyone bring
in their thoughts and ideas
and what a nice way to actually close out a project.
And this is where you're gonna reflect on the project.
Exactly, what did you learn?
Capture that information so that future projects
can borrow that information, as well.
Before your lessons learned meeting, I want to share
with you the best way to prep for this meeting, okay?
You now know what it's about
and when you can bring it in, but now actually
executing this meeting becomes really important.
So, really prepare accordingly,
and the biggest thing that you need to look at
is how are you going to collect these lessons learned,
and what sort of template?
So, the cool thing is, what I'm about to share with you
is the template I have in my own course,
Slay Project Management.
The link for that course is underneath this video
if you want to know anything more on that
'cause it actually provides you everything you need
at your fingertips to be successful for projects,
but for you here, if you don't want to check that out,
absolutely, okay.
You want to think about three specific areas
to help you guide you in the process?
So, I do them in columns and the first column is
what was actually supposed to happen,
and the beauty of this particular header
is that it doesn't matter when you bring this in,
beginning, middle, or an end of a project,
it's all relatable.
What the middle column is what actually happened.
So, what was supposed to happen?
What actually happened?
Again, focus on the facts.
Don't focus on personality, what actually happened.
And then your third column is the insights.
What could we do to make it better?
What could we do to improve it?
What could we do to keep it?
So, this is now your open ended column.
So, as the project manager,
as the facilitator of this lessons learned meeting,
you're going to populate the first two columns
'cause you have that information,
and when you come to the meeting you want to ensure that,
that information is readily available
and you want to review that with your team
so that they can all start piping in
to actually do that third column collectively as a group.
So, that preparation, that template is going to help you
with your structure, which becomes really, really important.
So, you have a very smooth lessons learned meeting,
and it's focusing on solutions, not on the problems.
Running the meeting for success.
All right, you now know about the prep.
You've done your work to prep it.
Now, you're at the meeting.
So, first and foremost, remember how I said to you
earlier on in the tip, kind of, if you're doing this
at the end of a meeting, make it like a celebratory meeting.
In fact, what I try to do when I do have meetings like this
and we're reviewing something that can sometimes
be a little bit of an emotional charge,
my way of decharging a situation is, yes,
to make sure I focus on the facts,
but as well as I bring food.
Okay, so I like to make sure that I'm feeding my team,
so that their bellies are very full
because that actually helps them relax a bit,
and I find it just it, when you break bread with people,
it does kind of change the tone a bit,
And for this type of meeting, it's actually really helpful.
So, I do do that and I find it works really well,
but now you're in the meeting.
What do you do?
Well, there's a couple of things you can consider,
whether, now, when you're in a virtual meeting
or in an in-person meeting.
So, let's talk about the virtual meeting
'cause I think a lot of us actually still do
virtual meetings and if we have global teams
we're definitely going to be with virtual meetings.
You already did your prep.
You have your sheet that has the three columns.
Well, you put that up on the screen
and you can walk through it collectively as a group,
reviewing each section and going across across the row.
So, if you have what was supposed to happen,
and you may have five, 10 things,
what was supposed to happen, what actually happened
and what are the insights that you wanna call out,
you just go across and you have everybody fill it in.
So, you can do that collectively as a group,
showing that on your screen.
Another option that you may want to consider,
and if you've had any of my other past videos
that you watched, I do, I love SharePoint
'cause I'll put things up on a SharePoint site
that my team has access to and I ask them to go into
the same document I'm working in,
so they may see my video,
but now they're also on their computer, inside the document,
and I may have us all like go through the two things
and have everyone input their thought
in a particular section.
So, now, they're inputting their thoughts
and we may then take away, at 15 minutes
after everyone's kind of put their two cents in,
review what everyone's done,
and that's another way you can do it.
Now, what about if you're an in person meeting?
You can do the exact same thing with what I said
with the virtual one, by putting it up on the screen
and every sitting around the table and eating.
So, sometimes that's actually the best way
to do it, when food's involved,
but another option too, is you can take the same concept
of, on like a template, but put it up on the wall
with sticky notes.
Have everyone take a sticky note
and add their insight that way,
and then everyone stands up and they're around the wall,
reading what other notes are being said, agreeing,
putting them together, maybe taking them away.
It's a really nice way to get that interaction
and get people's input for that lessons learned meeting
wherever it may be in a certain point in your project stage.
Compile the conclusion.
Okay, it doesn't, let me see.
It doesn't matter what you put down in your lessons learned,
if you don't do anything with them.
So, compiling them becomes really important
and sharing out that compilation becomes really important.
So, what I like to do, and that's why I do
like the template method because I can,
as everyone's talking and providing input,
I'm actually filling out my template
and it's already in a template.
All I have to do is, definitely spelling and grammar,
those who know me, I'm terrible at.
It's my kryptonite.
So, I just have to do a quality check there,
so I can turn around this document very quickly,
and then the key is to share it, share it with the team,
ask them to validate that you've captured everything
correctly and it allows 'em one more time to look at it,
and more importantly, share it with your steering committee,
share it with your senior executives,
share it with the end user,
the customer who's receiving that deliverable
that you had, share it with everyone,
so they can see it and learn from it as well.
And don't forget, save a copy for the next project
that you're on because you may have to borrow your own
lessons learned when you begin a new project,
but compiling the information in a preexisting
template is a great way to ensure you get it
out the door quickly and just ensure you validate it too.
Now, that you know how to run a lessons learned
meeting it is time for you to know all the project mistakes
you need to avoid.
I have this download for you in, download?
It's a link underneath this video just for you.
It's free.
I want to make sure you're really successful.
So, please grab it.