People in an organization usually move from one project to another, repeating the same mistakes, dealing with similar crises, despairing over underperforming team members, and more. Over and over. Some people learn informally what made one project successful and another unsuccessful, but knowledge is seldom formally captured.

The project management office research conducted by Business Improvement Architects of more than 750 global organizations reveals that two-thirds of the respondents are responsible for archiving documentation, although few organizations actually do so.

Archiving documentation at the completion of a project is the primary method of knowledge retention and transfer. More active approaches include knowledge-management systems and knowledge-sharing sessions.

How to retain lessons learned
BIA’s research found that organizations value passing along what worked and didn’t work on a project. This process begins with capturing lessons learned at the close of each project and retaining this information in a database. Two methods commonly used to retain the information and share it with future project teams include storage on an intranet site or on shared network drives in an organization’s database.

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