Lessons learned - more myth than reality?

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to try to cast new light into the existing knowledge of project management and lessons learned, exploring it by looking at aspects of the debriefing process with the learning aspect in mind. Methodology: The research is based on literature search/study (books, research articles and literature based on practice). Uses research questions, personal motivation and a proposed model as a guide for selecting aspects in the literature. The findings is visualized in a comparable table and shortly discussed. Findings: After action review seemed to be the nearest regards to a debriefing process used during work tasks with a high degree of learning and reflection. It is used for smaller issues as well as bigger ones and mostly used in teams. Some guidelines and affecting factors for the debriefing process has been shown From my literature search and findings it seemed that the term debriefing process used during work processes to learn from experience are used in lesser extent within project management and lessons learned. It should be noted that different types of project reviews found during the literature search used the debriefing process at the end of the project or in bigger phases and were ruled out Further I had to look outside my field and found many articles where the debriefing process was related to healthcare and used together with simulation and training. Other findings were within Psychological Debriefing used in crisis. These two fields were outside the scope of the thesis, and were included in the reading and assessing phase to get more answers. The psychologic debriefing were only included in the analysis to cast another perspective towards important factors for using the debriefing process.

Research limitations / Implications: The research was limited to project management, lesson learned and debriefing process used during work processes, and shows only a very small part of the field of topic. Due to a small amount of articles/literature found, some literature searches, and assessment of articles was partly included in the reading process to see if other topics were better developed regards to using the debriefing process. The main focus of the report is put in the methodology section regards to literature search, method used and documented. The analysis is mainly based on debriefing process used in after action reviews. Contribution: Tried to cast new light onto existing knowledge within lessons learned, with focus on debriefing process used during work task with the learning aspect in mind. I would recommend widening the search to find information from nearby topics.