Oil & Gas Project Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for an oil & gas project project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of delivering an oil and gas facility or field development.
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 an oil & gas project project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Oil & Gas Project project
Oil & Gas Project projects live or die on delivering an oil and gas facility or field development. 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 oil & gas project projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Oil & Gas Project-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail oil & gas project projects:
- HSE and regulatory risk
- Remote logistics
- Commodity price exposure
Example
On a real oil & gas project project, the lessons learned would be shaped by delivering an oil and gas facility or field development. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — HSE and regulatory risk, remote logistics, commodity price exposure — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.