I agree that closing a project without evaluating the lessons learned is a significant loss of opportunity. Documenting lessons learned is only valuable if the insights gained are accessible and embedded into future workflows. Finding the best format or platform to document and share lessons learned depends on the organization that you are working in, but there are some practices that can be applied across the board. Using a standardized format helps to ensure consistency across projects. This template should contain: what went well or repeatable best practices, what didn't do well or risks and process failures, how those risks were handled or mitigation strategies that were used, and recommendations for future projects. All of this information should be stored in a searchable, organization-wide knowledge management system. From my own personal experience, SharePoint works incredibly well when both working on a project and when looking back at lessons learned in the future. Tagging entries into the system by product type, regulatory pathway, etc. can help to improve retrievability. Another technique that can be beneficial is conducting cross-functional close out meetings where QA, manufacturing, and marketing meet to help generate deeper insights that may not be present in status reports. Recording these insights in the system can help ensure that all perspectives of the project are retained. In regulated environments like medical device development, lessons learned can reduce recurring delays if structured properly and tied back to the design control process. The goal isn't just to record lessons learned, but to build a living library that drives smarter and faster future development. There are certainly more techniques that can be used! Can you think of any other ones that may be useful?

In my experience, the best ways to document and share "lessons learned" or other important announcements is through a tool like Microsoft Sharepoint. Sharepoint is a very useful tool that many organizations use to store useful documentation and have it accessible to employees. The project itself, any isssues, and lessons learned can be documented in a Word document or PDF and then saved to the Sharepoint, then referenced in the future using a document number, title, or being pulled and talked about directly. Either way, Sharepoint is a fantastic tool that can be used for storing and making any document accessible. In addition to this, email is a good way to communicate things or send reminders on a large scale. Relevant employees, like a project management team, can be added to a group and when the previously mentioned "lessons learned" become applicable or a similar project begins and it is important to keep them in mind, the respective document can be shared to the email group. This will send an email with the document to every applicable employee, where its importance can be specified and emphasize. I think both tools like Sharepoint and email are great ways to document and share relevant documentation like "lessons learned" on a larger scale. 

The best methods to store information about lessons learned at the end of the project is through a method by which all team members can contribute to their experiences. This can be in the form of a slideshow presentation that can be formed by one person, however, each team member can contribute to beforehand. This slideshow can be presented in a meeting to go over everyone's thoughts or comments about their own experiences, as well as challenges that the team shared as a whole. This can be done for each project, and a folder can be created where these presentations are saved. Then, with each new project, the team can go over previous obstacles and make note to avoid them. It is important to not only document lessons learned, but also learn from them. 

Capturing lessons learned by using a slideshow presentation or using software like sharepoint is a good idea, but making these efforts to capture the project lessons without working off of them could defeat the purpose of doing so in the first place. These stored lessons should be applied to the project management process directly when reviewing designs and evaluating risk. Ideally, a company should develop a database that contains a majority of the lessons learned on past projects. Maybe something organized by project phase with summaries of lessons learned, with a redirect to sharepoint or slideshows to further explain how to mitigate issues and improve upon the past. Additionally, some companies might find success of short meetings which can allow a project team to learn from what was compiled from previous projects. Active participation in the material will help make sure that teams are encouraged to reflect and build off of their past projects. Visibility to a project team and its members is equally as important as the storage of these lesson learned files.

I think this is a great point. For bigger projects that have a larger impact or cover something new (new line of medical devices for the company or international product), it is very important to document risks and lessons learned so that future projects can take that into account. Something my workplace does is that we have a dashboard where project managers update their current project statuses with risks, milestones, and other information. Once that project is completed, it is saved in that dashboard. This dashboard is sent out and available to all project managers so they can look back at other relevant projects anytime and maybe even contact the projetc managers of those projects.

Lessons learned can also be used to include things discovered during experimentation that can be improved or modified to achieve better or different results. These can lead way to interesting ideas that can be a whole project to study itself. It can also include steps that can make production of a product more efficient or detailed, or even mistakes to avoid making. In other words, the end goal of keeping track of lessons learned should be to have a list of events that can improve the product or help those that make the product understand it more. It may also be used in reverse, where others try to replicate your steps, which will in turn verify the results previously collected.