Lessons learned were defined in the first chapter. Let’s delve into this subject more now. A lesson learned is a guideline for doing something. It can be related to the international project. It can be related to management. It can be related to the using the project results in a business process. Lessons learned don’t tell you what to do. That is a procedure. Instead, lessons learned tell you how to do the work better. Lessons learned are not a new phenomenon. They go back in time before languages were invented when people used symbols and word of mouth to pass information on. Lessons learned were a critical success factor for the ancient Egyptians, Romans, Chinese, and others. It has been shown by many historians that when a society or civilizations fail to continue to improve through lessons learned, then the society often fails. This was one of the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire. Moving to modern times, lessons learned have shown to be very useful in the military, manufacturing, marketing, and a wide variety of other areas.

It doesn’t stop there. International projects are dynamic. When you attempt to apply a lesson learned, there are several possible outcomes:

• The lesson learned did not apply or did not work in your project.

• Using the lesson learned, you produced work of higher quality or did the work in less time with fewer resources.

• You used the lesson learned and improved upon it.

It is as important to capture this additional experience as it is the original lesson learned. A related guideline here is that you should purge lessons learned that have not been used in a long time. The key idea here is to use the additional experience to update and expand on the lesson learned.

As with issues, there are various types of lessons learned. Here are some examples. Note that you would take the technical category and expand this for the type of international projects that you do.

• Project management;

• Project team;

• Project work;

• Methods;

• Tools;

• Technology;

• Technical;

• Marketing;

• Customer service.