Play Now: For your Project Management Professional (PMP)® Exam Elizabeth Harrin, FAPM There is no doubt in my mind that you have heard the term lessons learned before. It is mentioned extensively throughout A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, (PMBOK® Guide), I teach it as part of my PMP training lessons and my favorite search engine gives me over 51,000 results for the search term “lessons learned in project management”. In fact, as an experienced project manager you have probably participated or even chaired one or two lessons learned meetings yourself on your own projects. But let’s consider the bigger picture around lessons learned. What process do we follow? What management techniques are there for lessons learned? Are all documented lessons learned equally valuable? These questions need answers. And so I’m happy to welcome Elizabeth Harrin (www.girlsguidetopm.com -- www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethharrin/ - ) who has the answers for us! Episode Transcript Below are the first few pages of the transcript. The complete transcript is available to Premium subscribers only. Podcast Introduction Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello and welcome to Episode # 397. This is the Project Management Podcast™ at www.pm-podcast.com and I am Cornelius Fichtner. There is no doubt in my mind that you have heard the term “Lessons Learned” before. It is mentioned extensively throughout the PMBOK Guide. I teach it as part of my PMP Training Lessons and my favorite search engine gives me over 51,000 results for the search term, “Lessons Learned in Project Management”. In fact, as an experienced project manager, you have probably participated or even chaired one or two lessons learned meeting yourself on your own projects. If you are preparing for your PMP Exam, then the best way to calm the butterflies in your stomach is to take a Practice Exam. Our PMP Exam Simulator offers you nine such exams. To see how it works and take a free test drive, please go to www.freeexamsimulator.com . But let’s consider the bigger picture around lessons learned here. What processes do we follow? What management techniques are there for lessons learned? And are all documented lessons learned equally valuable? These questions need answers and so I’m happy to welcome Elizabeth Harrin who has the answers for us. And now, please pay attention. We’ll be doing a Lessons Learned at the end. Enjoy the interview. Female Voice:   Project Management Podcast™ Feature Interview.  Today with Elizabeth Harrin, author, blogger and speaker.   Cornelius Fichtner:   Hello, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Harrin:   Hello, Cornelius.  I’ll certainly do my best. Cornelius:   [laughs] Oh well, let’s find out because we’re going to be defining our topic first. From your perspective, what are lessons learned? Elizabeth:   They are the bits of organizational knowledge that we pick up as we go through our projects and you’ll typically find them split into things that went well—so all the things that we patted ourselves on the back about— “Yes, we did a great job on that!”—and then the things that didn’t go so well where we have issues and things. The main thing I would say when we’re defining “lessons learned” is that we need to make the distinction between “lessons captured” and “lessons learned” because often on projects and I know we’re going to talk more about the process of capturing output at the end of the project and later on in our discussion today, we often write things down and capture them without actually learning or doing anything with them. So, I suppose the key point for me as we’re starting this discussion is to think we really need to make sure that whatever comes out of our –whatever organizational knowledge we learn as we go, we actually do something with it and it becomes learned.  Cornelius:   And what do we mean by “management techniques” for lessons learned? Elizabeth:   Man