Outsourcing Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for an outsourcing project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of outsourcing a function to an external provider.
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 outsourcing project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for an Outsourcing project
Outsourcing projects live or die on outsourcing a function to an external provider. 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 outsourcing projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
Outsourcing-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail outsourcing projects:
- Knowledge transfer
- Service-level definition
- People impact
Example
On a real outsourcing project, the lessons learned would be shaped by outsourcing a function to an external provider. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — knowledge transfer, service-level definition, people impact — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.