When your business finishes a project, it's expected that all the members of the entire project team gather to discuss the results, the errors, and everything that happens during the project progress. This event is known as a lessons-learned session, where, as its name suggests, stakeholders capture lessons learned to pull off helpful conclusions for the subsequent projects. The best to perform this it's a lessons-learned template, a valuable document for your project teams.

When project managers call team members to participate in post-project review meetings, they hope everyone involved in the project shares their opinions and discusses things they learned.

This document captures all the project lessons learned by the project team. So, the lessons learned document is a binnacle summarizing and describing what they did well and wrong.

The primary objective of using this meeting is to gather lessons learned across the business. Then, documenting lessons learned is vital to make the right conclusions. This is the primary goal of the template, facilitating the record of everything happening in that gathering.

Using a lessons-learned template to record the best conclusions after completing a project brings three main benefits. Below we explain them.

1. It Helps Identify Strong and Weak Points

The project's success depends mainly on the number of solid and weak points of a specific project. Project stakeholders hope that all projects have key strengths and few weaknesses. A detailed lessons learned report helps to identify both aspects of the project. In lessons learned sessions, team members, managers, and other participants honestly speak about the project's best and worst sides.

2. It Helps Avoid Mistakes

When your team members know what they did well and what they did wrong, they can understand that, during the next project, they can't make the same mistakes. In other words, they will improve future projects thanks to their understanding of common errors in administration, time or resource managing, communications, etc.  

3. It Makes Team Members Feel Heard

When project team members speak about their own impressions and experiences in the project, they hope their words are recorded and taken into account. When they see that their opinions appear in the lessons learned report, they feel heard and part of the company.

The lessons-learned process involves five crucial steps to perform an excellent recording. These five stages will help you better understand related meetings and what findings you can get.

• Identifying. The first step of the lessons learned recording process is to identify positive and negative aspects that can be used to improve future projects. In this sense, you should treat these strong and weak points as valuable knowledge assets for future planning.

• Documenting. The purpose of this process is to document detailed information about the project and all the stages involved. Keep note of all the lessons learned during meetings and create a report with the most important points that stakeholders can later read. This information will benefit future work, or you must assess phases, products, performance, or participant interaction.

• Analyzing. Once the party members have finished gathering the information, you, your managers, and other stakeholders should examine it for insights. Conclusions will help to manage future processes better. This is the main benefit of using lessons-learned templates.

• Storing. Storing lessons learned in a repository is crucial to keep track of all the previous projects. This way, lessons-learned documents will be available for team members when they face a similar project. These files can also be used for training sessions and meetings.

• Retrieving. The last step is to retrieve all your team learned to use it on current projects. This information can also be helpful for other project managers of other teams or projects. That said, storing all the reports your teams generated on a shared drive is recommended. This way, any member can go to the drive and get the insight they need.

Once your team has completed its primary objective of recording everything mentioned in the meeting and creating the final lessons learned documents, it's time to use them further. Here are four main things you can do with that paper. 

It's unnecessary to share this document with everyone inside your business. There are a lot of people who do not have decision-making power or who are working in an external department. Whatever the case, you should share the final document with the right people, such as direct stakeholders. These people can provide valuable insights for your organization's following projects.

Once you've shared this valuable document with the entire team and other stakeholders, you should solicit feedback. With the knowledge gained, participants can share their thoughts about the strong and weak points recorded in this project management tool.

With the feedback in your hands, you can see aspects you didn't notice in the previous step. This way, you can detect even small errors. This detection can help you to design better project deliverables and more accurate project planning for the future of your business.  

Analyzing the project performance can provide multiple insights regarding the errors and hits your team had during past projects. For instance, the manager may have been negligent in time to perform specific tasks, or some external contractors didn't have the necessary skills to fulfill their roles. Regarding hits, your team may have carried out a project survey which gave valuable lessons for the planning process.

After you get these project management templates, the best you can do is to analyze the documented lessons learned and all the insights you obtained from them. This analysis will give you more details and relevant information about the project's progress, helping to create better planning.

You may designate a team member to ensure any essential part of the process is carried out and they arrive on the project schedule. This staff member should also track deliverables and ensure that details of the logistics company have been incorporated.

Below, we're giving you six relevant templates for sharing lessons learned quickly. These files will help you to keep your information organized in an accurate and timely manner. They also allow you to record the expected results without effort for subsequent analysis.

Still, before starting to use these templates, you need to know that classic applications of Microsoft Office are mandatory to use and edit these templates.

If you have license issues or lack resources to acquire the Microsoft Office suite, let us tell you that here, on RoyalCDKeys, you can purchase reliable versions of the famous Windows standalone software.

The Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global copy we share here is ideal for editing and working with the documents we're providing you. This version contains all the classic applications, such as Microsoft Word and Excel. With these apps on your machine, you can manage new projects and run an action plan, leading your organization to success.

Download it from Smarsheet.

This is a very detailed document to capture lessons learned quickly and deeply. This template contains multiple sections describing numerous positive and negative experiences. For example, it includes a paragraph describing the overall project overview, the project highlights, challenges, future considerations, lessons learned from the planning phase, the execution phase, human factors, and overall considerations. This document will help you not to repeat mistakes.

Download it from Templatelab.

This is a more limited document since it only contains critical questions to understand and deepen the lessons learned, for example, what worked well or what project circumstances were not anticipated. It also integrates three sections to describe project highlights and explain project successes. If your organization needs to evaluate a project outcome quickly, then this template is a valuable resource for those purposes.

Download it from ProjectManager.

This document corresponds to a shorter Excel template than other project management templates in this article. It integrates rows for wins and issues. Regarding wins, you should describe the feature's impact, and how it changes future projects and action items. The same story is for issues. Thanks to this document, you can improve similar projects in the future by paying attention to any critical part of them. 

Download it from Apolitical.

This document is similar to the previous one since it contains the same sections for similar practices. This is an alternative version of the above file but with other aspects and style. Just like the previous template, this is an excellent tool to identify areas of improvement and areas to keep. Here, the information gathered is easy to process and great for generating discussion for subsequent projects.

Download it from SampleTemplates.

This template corresponds to a blank document that you can use to include any topic or item you want to highlight. As it is a Microsoft Excel, it integrates several columns for different information. This is to communicate ideas better and improve collaboration between several stakeholders and team members. In this Excel file, you can explain the experience regarding a specific topic, describe the impact and recurrence of that item, and explain the lessons learned, either positive or negative.

A lessons-learned template will allow you to record any detail about the process your teams carried out to complete a specific project. After finishing the related meeting, your business can use this paper to determine what your teams should and should not repeat in future developments. This practice will also help control the budget and avoid unnecessary activities and tasks.

In conclusion, if you're looking for different types of templates for converting your business into a successful company, please navigate through our blog. Here you find multiple other documents and tools that will help you to organize and administer your organization easily!

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