Lessons learned during a project can be very relevant to our strategy.

Evaluation of Projects

Here's a small refresher on an important part of the Outlook process: Project Evaluations.

Although projects roll up towards a strategic goal, they have their own process.

What has changed with respect to projects in the latest Outlook Process Update?

A number of things stayed the same:

In the Outlook Meeting, we still end with a set of projects that need to be started somewhere in the next episode.
The project template still contains a section for evaluating the project, which is very similar to the project evaluations we previously did.
Projects should still be evaluated: it's an important way to learn.

However, a number of things also changed:

The project template was improved to include 'line-of-sight' to company/circle goals.
Project duration is no longer coupled to Outlook episode duration. Projects may take shorter or longer than an Outlook episode. Projects can start and end at any given time.
Although project evaluation is still needed, it will no longer be part of the Outlook evaluation.

This is how we want to make sure we capture learnings after finishing a project:

When a project has ended, the project manager should schedule a project evaluation as soon as possible.
A good project evaluation is about more than just the impact of lessons learned on our strategy. It can also result in other learnings:

After a project evaluation, the project learnings should be brought to the circle(s) the project was relevant in. The form for this is free. It could be as light as a Slack message or as heavy as a pizza session (or just a share of information in a tactical).
Strategic learnings from project evaluations are also briefly recapped in the Outlook episode evaluation (for those projects that have been finished, of course). We do this since, in the Outlook evaluation, we focus on evaluating our strategic goals. We consider how much closer we have come to our long-term vision, what has contributed to our progress, and whether there are new insights that lead to adjusting our strategic goals. We also consider whether we need to turn to other means to achieve our goals. Ultimately, the Outlook evaluation is about identifying the lessons we have learned and applying them to our future strategy.