It's sometimes easy to forget lessons learned from a project.
Morgini Ramen shares how the Kalexius team manages feedback and ensures continuous improvement
1. Gather feedback from the project team
Once a project is over, we do a ‘farewell’ call with the whole team. We do something fun like a Mentimeter quizz to celebrate our achievement and share our best – and worst! – experience from the project. The Project Lead also shares feedback from the client with the team. Then we send out a more formal questionnaire through Microsoft Forms. We ask team members to share what they would have done differently, which tools helped them and which did not, and their overall satisfaction as members to the project team. The questionnaire is anonymous and includes a set of common questions to all projects.
2. Review and analyze feedback
The results are analyzed in a meeting with project leadership and key internal stakeholders. We also touch upon more strategic issues such as client satisfaction, resource utilization, internal communications etc. We like to use a whiteboard and sticky notes for this session such as Microsoft Whiteboard.
3. Record key lessons learned and take action
The final step is to identify:
- Items where concrete action must be taken – e.g. templates to be updated, new training for staff members, or testing of new tools.
- Anything that can have an impact on a future project – e.g. should we consider more junior resources or new tools for future projects.
This goes in a running “project lessons learned” document, which is easily accessible to everyone. We make reading the document part of our project kick-off process so we don’t forget to leverage past lessons learned. We also collect a baseline of key metrics based on the data gathered in the questionnaires so we can compare projects.
