System Integration Lessons Learned
This is a practical guide to building a lessons learned for a system integration project — what went well and badly, captured to improve future projects, adapted to the realities of integrating multiple systems into a coherent whole.
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 system integration project it plays the same role, tuned to this kind of work.
Why it matters for a System Integration project
System Integration projects live or die on integrating multiple systems into a coherent whole. 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 system integration projects drift into avoidable delay and cost.
What to include
- What happened
- Impact
- Root cause
- Recommendation
System Integration-specific considerations
Tailor the lessons learned to the risks that most often derail system integration projects:
- Interface and API complexity
- Data consistency
- Vendor coordination
Example
On a real system integration project, the lessons learned would be shaped by integrating multiple systems into a coherent whole. In particular, it should explicitly account for the project’s biggest risks — interface and API complexity, data consistency, vendor coordination — rather than treating them as afterthoughts.