Question

In this discussion, please address the following: Why do lessons learned documents fail to capture meaningful information that could help future projects in the future? Research and discuss the reasons why a project closeout is considered unsuccessful Who decides to close out a project? Provide reasoning for your response.

Answer 1

Why do lessons learned documents fail to capture meaningful information that could help future projects in the future?

Lessons learned programs are aimed at documenting problems from past projects to be used as problem predictors for future projects. However, those in charge of closing out the project often fail to properly document. This sometimes occurs during closeout. For instance, members performing the closeout assume that a problem was a one ? time, non ? recurring event. Therefore, there is no need to document it for future reference. Other times, the source of the error is misinterpreted making it difficult to learn from the experience. Or, there may be the belief that the project is too unique to be beneficial for future use. Another problem that makes lessons learned inefficient is that future PMs do not look at the documents prior to beginning new projects. This may be due to a lack of procedure, time, or care for performing research of past projects.