On the final day of the project, the evaluation report is reviewed, approved and archived within half an hour. Six months later, a new team starts on a similar project — without ever having opened that report.
What goes wrong between writing it down and applying it
Williams (2007) examined this mechanism systematically: lessons from individual projects are, in practice, rarely absorbed into an organisation's broader policy or procedures. The reason is not unwillingness or incompetence among project teams: the report is often delivered neatly enough. The reason is that without a targeted effort and a designated process to implement lessons organisation-wide, simply nothing happens with what was written down. The report lands in an archive, the next project starts with a new team that never saw the previous report, and the cycle repeats itself.
Williams identifies three direct consequences of this: lessons are lost, mistakes are repeated, and opportunities for efficiency gains go unused. None of those three will surprise anyone who has ever worked in an organisation. The point is that it is a predictable, structural pattern, not incidental bad luck.
Why this is not simply "badly written reports"
It is tempting to frame this as a writing problem: if only lessons-learned reports were more concrete, sharper or more readable, things would improve. That is part of the story, but not the core of it. The real problem lies a step further on: even an excellently written report changes nothing if there is no mechanism that actually lets the lessons land. An owner who picks up the action, a moment where the next project kick-off actively consults the previous report, a portfolio office that spots patterns across multiple projects.
This connects to what PRINCE2 practice treats as a core distinction between the End Project Report and the Lessons Report: the primary purpose of lessons reporting is to prompt action: embedding positive lessons, preventing negative ones from recurring, not merely documenting them. Lessons are, moreover, captured continuously through a Lessons Log throughout the project's duration, not collected all at once at the end. That shifts the emphasis from "delivering a good document" to "embedding an organisational mechanism."
The psychological angle: why a culture of blame blocks learning
There is another factor that compounds the problem, and it is widely recognised in project management practice: lessons reporting does not work well in a culture where evaluations are used to hold people to account. If an honest lesson ("we underestimated the risk of supplier delay") is read as an admission of guilt, lessons get formulated more cautiously, vaguer, and less useful. Psychological safety is not a soft skill here. It is a precondition for a lessons report that actually says something.
What this means for assessing an evaluation report
If documenting is not the same as learning, then the question an evaluation report must answer goes beyond "which lessons were drawn": is there an explicit link between each lesson and a follow-up action with an owner? Is what went well named alongside what went wrong, rather than a one-sided success story? And are the lessons concrete and traceable to a specific event, rather than phrased generically, such as "communication could be better"?
Those are precisely the three sub-criteria on which EvaluatieScore assesses the lessons learned & follow-up actions category, the signature category of the instrument, directly based on the distinction that both Williams (2007) and PRINCE2 practice draw between recording and actually embedding.
It's important to be clear about what this research does and does not show: Williams (2007) describes a pattern in knowledge transfer within project organisations, based on research published through an academic repository. It is not experimental proof that a well-embedded learning process automatically leads to better future projects. That step may contribute to better organisational learning, but is not scientifically proven as a causal link. We deliberately use that more modest phrasing.
Upload your evaluation report at dutchmind.com/producten/evaluatiescore and get a score for €15, including a check on the link between lessons and follow-up actions.
Sources
- Williams, T. (2007), Post-Project Reviews to Gain Effective Lessons Learned — eprints.soton.ac.uk.
- PRINCE2-praktijk — End Project Report en Lessons Report Template (prince2.wiki, secundaire bron, geen officiële AXELOS-manual).