Before you close
Lessons Register Analyzer
Find the lessons your projects keep recording and never learning, see what they are about, and pick out the lessons nobody is set to act on.
Open a lessons register with lessons from as many projects as you have, one row each. It is read inside your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Lessons register
Drop a spreadsheet here
One row per lesson, across as many projects as you have: the lesson, the project and date, and the recommendation, its owner and status if you keep them. A category column and a went-well or to-improve column are used if present.
Recorded is not learned
Every project writes lessons at its close, and they go into a register that the next project rarely opens. The honest test of whether an organization learns from them is whether the same lesson keeps turning up. It usually does, in different words each time: build started before the requirements were signed off, the requirements were still changing after sign-off because the business had not agreed them, the team built from requirements nobody had signed. Three projects, one lesson.
What is found
Lessons from different projects that say the same thing, grouped, with the projects, the dates and the recommendations each time, and a note when an earlier recommendation is marked closed and the lesson came back anyway. Themes, from the words in each lesson, with the words shown so nothing is a black box, and your own categories counted as you wrote them. Lessons with no recommendation, recommendations with no owner, and lessons too vague to learn from, such as “communication could have been better.”
What this does not do
It reads words, not meaning: two lessons about the same thing written with no words in common will not be grouped, and the themes are only as good as their word lists, which are shown. It does not decide which lessons matter most; how often a lesson comes back is a strong hint, not a ranking.