A New Year brings new projects. What about the projects you finished in Dec? The following are some tips on doing lessons learned specifically to get ideas on how to improve your new projects.

• As you gear up for the new projects take some time and look at last year's projects. If possible schedule a formal lessons learned session.
• If you are crunched for time schedule lessons learned for projects that have additional phases or are similar to this years projects.
• If you don't have time for a formal lessons learned you can do an informal one with a few people. Try a 30 min phone conf. to save time.
• When you do lessons learned what you want to discover is what techniques worked so that you can continue applying and improving them
• Lessons learned can also be used to uncover things you need to do differently. Be careful to focus on 2 or 3 things to change
• If you make a list of everything that went wrong on projects and try to fix them you will become overwhelmed which makes changes harder.
• To enforce what worked on other projects make copies of sample docs etc and share them with the team
• When trying to improve or change items that did not work create a definitive action plan of how to improve and share with the team.
• When using lessons learned also leverage best practices from outside the organization. Resaerch how others have solved similar issues.

If possible save the lessons learned in the project repository and add keywords so you can search for the data in the future.