End-of-Project Lessons Learned

Below is an example agenda for a half-day lessons learned meeting at the end of a project (sometimes called a Project Closeout Meeting). It includes:

• who should attend.
• meeting objectives.
• meeting deliverables.
• agenda items showing a suggested sequence of team discussion, brainstorming, and analysis by which the team can agree upon what went well on the project, what didn’t, and what should be done differently next time.

Meeting Objectives:

1. Understand how this project performed against its original goals (time, resources, scope)
2. Identify “lessons learned” and recommendations for future projects.
3. Set actions to ensure lessons learned are considered during planning of next project.

The only way to avoid problems happening yet again in the future is carefully consider what went wrong and why, and make sure there is a way to transfer related recommendations forward

Deliverables from Meeting:

• Report including:
  • Review and analysis of plan vs. actual milestone achievement and state of what we delivered vs. the original requirements
  • Team’s brainstorm list of wins and challenges
  • Team’s list of derived recommendations for achieving the wins and avoiding the challenges on future projects
  • Open issues list and action items
• Key items will be turned into templates and checklists for use during projects.

Agenda Item	Facilitator(s)	Time
Introduction, agenda review, ground rules	Stakeholder	5 min
Wins and challenges Project retrospective: Review planned vs. actual on major milestones and how what we released mapped to original major requirements Round-robin brainstorm: Go around the table and record a win or challenge from each person. Keep going until no one else has items to add. Map back to major project issues—which challenges contributed most to milestone and Vision shortfalls? Which wins contributed most to what the project accomplished?	ALL	xx min
Create lessons learned recommendations Wins: what do we think other projects should do to achieve these wins? Challenges: how should future projects avoid each issue we identified?	Stakeholder	xx min
Next steps Review action items and finalize assignments.	Stakeholder	xx min.

Reference:
Global Brain Inc.’s Quality Rapid Product Development QRPD methodology