Lessons Learned System Plan

Start With Knowing Where You Want To Go

There are different kinds of goals that drive Lessons Learned implementations. Some organizations are looking for Lessons Learned to provide a repository for their problem reports. For compliance issues and legal protection, these organizations seek to retain a record of each problem event and the solutions discovered. Doing so establishes and documents the fact that due diligence in addressing the issue was done.

Some organizations want to use Lessons Learned as a library of experience that their users can look through in order to gain operational knowledge. This is done, of course, in an attempt to maximize the value and cost-benefits of the lessons.

Some organizations see Lessons Learned as a system that is a proactive way of spreading knowledge around the organization. These organizations recognize that the time spent investigating problems and the resulting new solutions that are discovered are meaningless unless those solutions get into the hands of someone who needs it and has the authority to take action.

Beyond the traditional value of lessons learned, many organizations see the potential of trending the data contained within these reports in order to glean the big picture of operational patterns. With this overview capability, executive managers can better manage the operations, strategies and goals of the organization.

All of these above discussed benefits are things that organizations can get excited about. However, the problem is that there has never been an effective design for a Lessons Learned system that delivered on these promises…until REASON®.

Information is only as powerful as it is (1) organized, (2) associated and (3) accessible to users who need the information. There is a lot of information in a library, but without effective organization and a method for associating facts it would be hard to find anything of use in any reasonable amount of time. REASON® organizes and associates data in a unique and proprietary way that enables Lessons Learned to be more than a black hole for event data.

Historically, regardless of what goals have driven organizations to establish Lessons Learned initiatives, they have typically ended up developing or picking conventional archive-centric, database systems that have relied upon conventional word search capabilities...much like internet searching.

With such designs, the volume of data soon grows to the point where conventional data searches produce long lists of records that must be studied individually in order to determine their relevance. In other Lessons Learned systems, as the amount of data grows within the system, the more inaccessible and impractical it becomes to use the system as a real-time data resource for operations and decision making. When this begins to happen in other systems, it is invariably because of the archive-centric design of these systems. Archival-centric database designs are inherently flawed at enabling the kind of quick access that operations require. These types of systems eventually discourage use and cause lessons learned to become a white elephant that serves little purpose except as a static storehouse of data.

In Short, the promises of having an immediately accessible and dynamic resource of valuable on-the-job knowledge and a quick data resource for decisions are broken by the fundamental design restrictions of conventional Lessons Learned approaches.

REASON approaches these goals in a whole new and unique way.

A good Lessons Learned system demands a good problem solving system (Root Cause Analysis) to feed it with quality lessons. Additionally, key to having a powerful and effective Lessons Learned process that is successful at communicating quality solutions is the ability of the Root Cause Analysis system to organize the data in a way that makes the information quickly and reliably accessible down the road. The REASON Lessons Learned System accomplishes this through its proprietary RCA process and its Lessons Leared “situational” search engine that finds common situational "DNA" across the organization. Instead of long lists of word search results that must individually be poured through to find value, REASON pinpoints common situations and finds the exact information that directly relates to the problem at hand.

The REASON Lessons Learned System provides you with all of the tools to accomplish all of the goals and advantages discussed in this page . . . and more.

For more information, please call (903) 236 9973 or email us at dsi@lessonslearned.com.