Hi Brad,
Probably not enough, having said that I've got two coming up this week, the first for a while. Both projects were a success, not to say there weren't things we couldn't have done better.
The risk management for one of the projects was not seen as satisfactory, although as project manager I was happy with the risk mitigation. The project has attracted criticism for not utilising better risk management, even though there were robust processes in place to prevent failure. It's a strange situation to have a project success with so much criticism. I'm looking forward to doing the lessons learned session and giving the problems an airing.
A key lesson I'm taking from this project is to make sure there is better communication of risks. Even though I thought they had been properly communicated, people involved in the project said they weren't aware of all the risks. They hadn't read the documentation and had made assumptions based on previous experience. In addition, one careless remark caused serious concern a few hours before go-live. I kick myself now for not communicating better, but people must take some responsibility to find out the information they need and not sit back and wait for others to deliver it.
Of course I've got the usual people imbued with 20/20 hindsight telling me what I should have done. Funny, they didn't mention any of this at the beginning of the project.
The key thing I've found with a lessons learned session is not the drawing out of lessons that counts, but acting upon them in the future. A common mistake is to file lessons learned in inaccessible documents and file systems. I prefer to write them into processes, always asking, 'how are we going to implement these lessons?' It's best if you can change working practices now and not rely on people remembering the lessons or finding them in documents later.
Finally, I don't worry about finding every possible lesson from a project. I pull out the main ones and use them to improve -- incremental improvement is what you need. Do it better next time. Or as Gerry Rafferty would say,
Get it right next time and yes, I'm listening to the song while writing this.
There is a useful topic about running lessons learned sessions here:
Lessons Learned: It's Déjà Vu All Over Again
Cheers,
Duncan