HKSM

A short, structured session held after a task, event, or milestone to examine what was expected, what occurred, why it happened, and how to improve. It converts experience into actionable lessons and updates to ways of working. This helps teams learn quickly during execution and strengthens governance.

Key Points

• Focused, time-boxed discussion (often 15–45 minutes) held soon after the work finishes.
• Blameless, fact-based conversation that emphasizes learning over fault-finding.
• Uses a simple structure: objectives, results, causes, and improvements.
• Facilitated by the project manager or neutral moderator to ensure equal participation.
• Produces concrete actions, owners, and due dates, not just observations.
• Feeds updates to the lessons learned register and organizational knowledge base.
• Applicable after releases, sprints, incidents, workshops, or key decisions.
• Supports governance by making performance insights and process changes transparent.

Purpose of Analysis

The session turns real outcomes into practical improvements the team can adopt immediately and share across the organization.

• Improve future performance by identifying what to repeat and what to change.
• Reduce recurring issues through quick root-cause insights and targeted actions.
• Capture tacit knowledge while memories are fresh to aid onboarding and scaling.
• Inform updates to standards, checklists, and operating procedures.
• Provide evidence of continuous improvement for governance and audits.

Method Steps

• Plan the session: schedule soon after the event, time-box it, invite the right participants.
• Prepare materials: goal statement, plan vs. actual data, key metrics, timeline, and a standard template.
• Set ground rules: psychological safety, focus on facts and processes, not people.
• Revisit intent: restate objectives and acceptance criteria to align the discussion.
• Reconstruct what happened: walk through a concise timeline and surface critical moments.
• Analyze causes: probe gaps using techniques like the 5 Whys or fishbone diagrams.
• Identify improvements: define specific actions, owners, due dates, and success measures.
• Decide on knowledge updates: lessons learned entries, checklist or SOP changes, and training needs.
• Close and communicate: summarize decisions, confirm follow-up cadence, and share with stakeholders.
• Track completion: monitor action items and verify that improvements deliver the intended results.

Inputs Needed

• Objectives, acceptance criteria, and definition of done for the work reviewed.
• Planned approach, schedule, and roles and responsibilities.
• Actual results: metrics, logs, dashboards, and deliverable demos or screenshots.
• Decision log entries relevant to scope, quality, risks, or resources.
• Risk, issue, and change records that influenced outcomes.
• Stakeholder and customer feedback, including support tickets or survey snippets.
• Incident or defect reports with timestamps and severity.
• Facilitation template and a simple means to capture notes and actions.

Outputs Produced

• Action items with owners, due dates, and acceptance criteria.
• Updates to the lessons learned register with clear context and tags.
• Recommendations or change requests for process, standards, or tools.
• Knowledge base updates: playbooks, checklists, and SOP revisions.
• Training or coaching needs identified for individuals or the team.
• Brief summary or minutes shared with relevant stakeholders and the PMO.

Interpretation Tips

• Separate one-off anomalies from systemic patterns across multiple reviews.
• Quantify improvement opportunities by impact on time, cost, quality, or risk.
• Prioritize few, high-leverage changes over a long list of minor tweaks.
• Link insights to decisions: verify whether outcomes flowed from explicit trade-offs.
• Distinguish controllable factors from external constraints to focus effort.
• Validate changes with a small experiment before standardizing widely.

Example

After a sprint release caused a brief outage, the team conducts a 30-minute session. They compare the planned deployment checklist to actual steps and discover an undocumented pipeline change disabled a critical smoke test.

• Actions: restore the test gate, update the checklist, and add a pre-release verification step.
• Owners and dates: DevOps lead by Friday; QA lead adds an automated check by next sprint.
• Knowledge updates: lessons learned entry tagged “deployment” and “automation,” plus SOP revision.

Pitfalls

• Blame-oriented tone that discourages candor and hides useful information.
• Drifting into status reporting instead of focusing on causes and improvements.
• Too many vague takeaways with no owners or deadlines.
• Skipping key participants, especially those closest to the work.
• Holding sessions too infrequently or too late to influence outcomes.
• Not closing the loop on actions, so the same issues recur.
• Relying on opinions without data from logs or metrics.

PMP Example Question

Mid-project, a release misses its deployment window. The project manager wants to prevent recurrence and quickly capture team insights without assigning blame. What should the project manager do next?

1. Schedule an after-action review using a standard template and neutral facilitation.
2. Update the risk register and move on to the next sprint without discussion.
3. Escalate to the sponsor to assign accountability and penalties.
4. Send an anonymous survey and archive the responses without follow-up.

Correct Answer: A — Schedule an after-action review using a standard template and neutral facilitation.

Explanation: A structured, blameless session captures insights and produces actionable improvements. It supports continuous learning during execution and informs the knowledge base.