SC QUALITY GUILDLessons learned register
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Close out a project with results against goal, schedule and cost, a register of lessons with owners and recommendations, and a plan for moving the knowledge to the people who need it.
ON THE EXAM · CMQ/OE III.A.7, III.C.4 · FREE · NOTHING YOU TYPE LEAVES YOUR BROWSER
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Why lessons learned fail
Most organizations hold a lessons-learned meeting at the end of a project. Fewer change anything because of it. The usual pattern is a document filed on a shared drive, written in general terms, with no owner and no change to how the next project is run. A lesson is learned only when behavior or the system changes: a procedure, a template, a checklist, a training plan, or the way a team works.
Tacit and explicit knowledge
Explicit knowledge can be written down and shared through documents, procedures and databases. Tacit knowledge lives in people: judgment, skill, know-how and relationships that are hard to put into words. Nonaka and Takeuchi's SECI model describes four ways knowledge moves:
- Socialization, tacit to tacit: shared experience, mentoring, job shadowing.
- Externalization, tacit to explicit: writing down what people know, as a lessons register does.
- Combination, explicit to explicit: merging it into procedures, standards and databases.
- Internalization, explicit to tacit: learning by doing until the new way is a habit.
The trap is to treat all knowledge as explicit. A procedure update will not transfer a senior technician's judgment; mentoring or a community of practice will.
Barriers to sharing
Common barriers are a blame culture (people hide what went wrong), lack of time at project close, no place to find past lessons, the belief that each project is unique, and knowledge treated as personal power. Leaders lower them by asking for what went well as well as what went wrong, by keeping the review about the process rather than the people, and by visibly acting on what is recorded.
The close-out summary
Project closure confirms that deliverables were accepted, compares results with the goal in the charter, reports schedule and cost against plan, releases the team, hands remaining work to an owner, and archives the project documentation. The lessons register belongs in that package and should be searchable by the next project manager.
On the CMQ/OE exam
Expect to tell tacit from explicit knowledge, to match a SECI stage to an activity, and to choose the best way to make a lesson stick.