Lessons learned are one of the truly uncharted areas of PM discovery. So much good is available there. Why aren’t they used more and reviewed more often by other teams? Here are my thoughts:
1. We’re all too busy to make the time.
2. The results often require time, thought and planning to apply to other projects. (See item 1).

Chris – out of the box solution for lessons learned would be a good way to start. If it were a tool though, you might have to work hard to convince people that their comments wouldn’t come back to bite them later. This is almost always an issue for PMs to overcome in getting “real lessons learned”.

Alec

Great post! It has been my experience that most lessons learned don’t end up in circulation because there really isn’t an easy way to document and share them.

I think that it has to occur to a PM that there may be a lesson from another project that can be applied to their own project for them to go looking for information. Then the information needs to be readily accessible and easy to navigate, like you mention.

Are there any “out of the box” solutions, strictly for lessons learned, besides the typical knowledge managements systems out there today?

-chris