Saving Lessons Learned
I don’t think I need to explain what exactly is lessons learned, but just for the context, let me share what is lessons learned as per NASA, European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — “A lesson learned is knowledge or understanding gained by experience. The experience may be positive, as in a successful test or mission, or negative, as in a mishap or failure…A lesson must be significant in that it has a real or assumed impact on operations; valid in that is factually and technically correct; and applicable in that it identifies a specific design, process, or decision that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps, or reinforces a positive result.” [1]
While lessons learned is strongly recommended and extensively promoted by the PMI and PRINCE2, what I have observed is that logging of lessons learned has decreased a lot in the real world of delivery of projects. Lately, the practice of Project Managers logging and later reviewing it has decreased a lot compared to 10 years back. This might be because of the way there is no proper or easy way to retrieve and learn from the recorded data.
With so much data being available everywhere, we need to move out of the old traditional way of going through excel files and massive web pages to review the lessons learned. Maybe we need to look into the new and innovative ways to retrieve the information so that we save them the time and effort in using the lessons learned.
While I was thinking about what can be the most possible, easy and innovative way for helping the project managers and respective people to retrieve the lessons learned from the database, I felt using of Chatbots is a good one.
While I don’t need to explain what is a Chatbots, I can share that the latest Chatbots are well designed and created to self-learn based on the questions we ask and also use the latest ML and AI algorithms to make it feel a lot like humans. See, as social beings, we are very much conversation oriented and interaction lovers. So, bringing these main 2 elements into the work and connect them with the massive unstructured databases as well as search elements on internet, we are creating a new way to use lessons learned from internal databases as well as external sources.
When I ran this idea with a couple of folks in my organization they were totally convinced and with the help of expert into the team we created a Chatbot. Below is screen shot on how Chatbot looks in the organizational internal G-Chat.
The Chatbot mainly for reading the unstructured data from a massive google sheet and return back the content as if they are talking to a person. And it was an amazing feeling. This could easily be part of the official chat of the organization, so this is just like adding a Bot and talking to a group of people. We integrated the Chatbot ith mainly 3 elements
- References of the process templates
- References of Global Lessons Learned database
- References of organisation Project Management glossary
The Chatbot records the questions that are not answered and we can later use ML to train it as well as connect Chatbot to internet so that the information can be retrieved from various sources.
I ran this idea with some more folks across the organization and it is instantly accepted and now every region wants to adopt it.
Check this idea for any area where you have a lot of unstructured and want to add an interactive way to use the data. With this coming into picture, I strongly believe we can revive the lost glory of the Lessons Learned.
[1]: [Secchi, P. (Ed.) (1999). Proceedings of Alerts and Lessons Learned: An Effective way to prevent failures and problems (Technical Report WPP-167). Noordwijk, The Netherlands: ESTEC]
