Disaster Recovery Setup Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a disaster recovery setup project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of establishing backup and disaster-recovery capability.
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 disaster recovery setup project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a Disaster Recovery Setup project
Disaster Recovery Setup projects live or die on establishing backup and disaster-recovery capability. 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 disaster recovery setup projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Disaster Recovery Setup-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail disaster recovery setup projects:
- Recovery-time objectives
- Untested failover
- Ongoing maintenance
Example
On a real disaster recovery setup project, the lessons learned would be shaped by establishing backup and disaster-recovery capability. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — recovery-time objectives, untested failover, ongoing maintenance — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.