One of the favourite sayings of my father is “Wisdom is not in not making mistakes, but in not making the same mistake twice”. This is an important lesson for all of us as project managers. Learning from our mistakes helps us to become better project managers – experience is always a good teacher.

But what we should all be trying to do is make sure we are not the only ones to learn from our mistakes. Making sure others in our organisation, or even our profession, get the benefit of our experience is an important part of our professional lives.

So how do we go about this? Well, first of all, we need to recognise when we have made mistakes, when we have not taken the best action in a given situation. This needs a certain amount of honesty, and to be done well, it needs time to really consider the project as a whole.

The best way of doing this is to analyse the project when it comes to an end. Hopefully, the project will come to an end successfully, with the end result we wanted delivered. But it may be that the project has been stopped early, for whatever reason. Regardless, at this point we need to evaluate a number of things:

• Exactly how successful was the project really?
• What actions did we take that helped?
• What actions did we take that didn’t?
• What problems occurred?
• How did we deal with them?
• Were there things we could have done better?
• Were there things we didn’t do that could have helped?

As you can see, there is a lot of ground to cover. You will also note that a lot of this involves honestly looking at your own work. Now, this can be tough, especially when looking at places where we messed up. But it is only by examining our mistakes that we can learn from them.

However, to help us out in this area, it is always useful to have help in doing this analysis. Your Executive is a prime example to examine your work, but don’t neglect your project team members. Your team will have a different perspective than your Executive, and as they are closer to the nitty gritty work of the project, may have valuable insights into areas that went wrong.

But I don’t want you to go overboard on only focusing on the mistakes. It is equally important to learn from the successes, so that these can be replicated in the future.

All of this analysis should be formally presented as a report, an evaluation of the project as a whole, a set of lessons to be learned. This report should be the final part of your project, where you look back at the work that was done. It can form a valuable tool for future project managers working on a similar project – your experiences can inform their work.

This means that hopefully not only won’t you make the same mistakes again, nor will anyone else in your organisation!

Oh, and that saying my father likes? I don’t know who said it first, because a similar message is attributed to numerous people. Which kind of demonstrates the benefits of spreading good messages too – lots of people can learn from it!