Nick Bruse, the Head of Thinc Beyond division of project management consultancy Thinc, outlines the common mistakes made in post-project evaluations and meetings.

Often in workplaces, learning is left up to the individual. Typically, we’re all expected to bed down our successes and avoid repeating our past mistakes. However, project successes, failures and improvements are often the result of the actions of multiple individuals and the interactions between them.

It’s likely your organisation is running multiple projects at any given time; so learning from them is vital to improving performance. Organisations must therefore take a proactive and collective approach to gathering feedback. There is a range of collective approaches, but we find that getting the team together for an evaluation meeting to discuss the project has the biggest benefits.

This approach – a ‘lessons-learnt workshop’ – encourages positive team relationship and fosters a culture of trust and improvement, but it is also fraught with challenges. There are four cardinal sins of the lessons-learnt workshop that must be considered to ensure an organisation effectively learns from its previous projects.

Don't let it become another ineffectual meeting 
Make sure this is the best meeting you have ever run. That way, people will feel positive about the time they’ve invested. Spend time planning your purpose and objectives and create an agenda that makes the best use of everyone’s time. Make sure you have someone responsible for facilitating or chairing the meeting. Without a strong process and facilitation, it’s likely to turn into another talkfest. If you think this will happen, it’s probably better to do nothing at all and wait until you’re confident in the process, rather than running another ineffectual meeting that makes it harder to gain time commitments in the future.

Avoid the blame game
Often people’s reputations are on the line when you start looking at successes and failures on projects. If you have challenging egos or relationships on the project, managing group dynamics can be especially challenging. Setting some ground rules and good preparation can help, but it’s also worthwhile thinking beforehand about how you might handle particular people or behaviours in the room. You should consider having someone external to the project chair the meeting, so they can be a neutral party and more objective.

Make sure you have a process to ensure action
The most important part of the workshop is planning for what comes after it. This helps design workshop outcomes and a follow-up process that maps workshop goals with business goals. Running a workshop has intrinsic value on its own, through the reflective discussion that ensues. Understandably though, the most value comes from actually using the lessons to improve in the future. If your project management process doesn’t allow resources to do this, how is it going to happen? If you are responsible for a lessons-learnt workshop, ask yourself upfront: ‘What do we want to do with the lessons and how will we ensure action?’

Make sure you design how you will carry through these actions. This may involve tabling the actions in a regular project control group, giving individuals accountability and integrating them into KPIs and role descriptions.

If you want to create a learning culture, don’t make it optional
If you are going to start holding lessons-learnt workshops regularly, you should establish very clear expectations in your organisation or project around these workshops and your commitment to them. You must explain why they are important and when to do them, ensuring you match the process to the scale and phase of the project. Some of the considerations include the type and detail of process you will use at the start of, during, and at the end of projects. Even running a brief meeting at the start of a project to find out what was learnt from previous projects and experiences can be invaluable. By being clear on when you run workshops, you avoid an ad-hoc or optional approach. The reason being, it’s hard for busy people to commit to something that’s considered ‘optional’ when they have plenty of other deadlines to meet. If you or your organisation wants to be a market leader, this must change.

By avoiding these pitfalls and adopting a collective, feedback-based approach, you will foster a culture of continual improvement, inspire commitment to act on previous lessons and overcome any complacency in your team. Ultimately, this will generate competitive advantage and ensure your organisation’s future success.

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