Identifying the hard lessons from projects – easily

Learning lessons from projects is important, but the practice of project post-mortems does not occur frequently in practice. Recent work suggests that, one reason might be the difficulty in identifying the "hard", non-intuitive lessons from projects, such as those resulting from feedback and dynamic, systemic effects (which are difficult to discern intuitively and can greatly exacerbate initially small effects). However, while there are bodies of work to explain such effects, what are needed are simple, practical analysis methods that can be used routinely in post-project reviews to explicate how the project out-turn resulted and to identify the lessons which need to be learned. This paper reports a post-project review in NCR Financial Solutions Group Ltd., as an example of using just such simple techniques. It describes the procedures used, outlines the results found and discusses when and where such techniques might add value. Finally, it points the way ahead to more wide-ranging research in this field, to enable managers to identify the real lessons from the projects, including the hard lessons, but practically and easily. This paper will hopefully contribute to managers' ability to learn from projects.