Change Management Programme Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a change management programme project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of delivering large-scale organisational change.
What a Lessons Learned is
A lessons learned is what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects. For the full concept and how it works in general, see Lessons Learned. On a change management programme project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Change Management Programme project
Change Management Programme projects live or die on delivering large-scale organisational change. A well-built lessons learned gives the team a shared, explicit reference for exactly that — reducing ambiguity, aligning stakeholders, and making problems visible early enough to act. Skipping it, or doing it generically, is how change management programme projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Change Management Programme-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail change management programme projects:
- Resistance to change
- Sustaining adoption
- Leadership alignment
Example
On a real change management programme project, the lessons learned would be shaped by delivering large-scale organisational change. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — resistance to change, sustaining adoption, leadership alignment — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.