Featured Guest Blogger: Robert Mote

Motagg’s Blog by Robert Mote

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Every major project carries out an exercise to determine the Lessons Learned for future projects based on the design and execution of the present project.

When a project approaches maturation, project management decides to arrange a three-day Lesson Learned seminar across all disciplines. Some three weeks before the seminar, a spreadsheet is rushed out to all parties and engineers are sucking the pencils to come up with a lesson learned or hoping their colleagues will remember something useful. The engineer may be looking for a job, another project, thinking about holidays and, all too often, the activity of lessons learned is regarded a waste of time.  All the engineers and designers who could usefully contribute have long left the project anyway. It is even harder to remember the day-to-day issues of design work long past that would benefit a Lesson Learned. As most engineers do not follow their design through to completion, they cannot know the reality of design is so different to site practices.

Project management would consider it a success if ten to twenty items were captured for each discipline as Lessons Learned. Many engineers would also say that nobody reads the Lesson Learned of a previous project or follow them. I take a different viewpoint completely.

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