Lessons learnt at CRUK Centre for Drug Development

As part of the closeout of a project, you really must conduct a formal ‘Lessons Learned’ exercise, right?

Well, no, not necessarily.

A few years ago, Cancer Research UK Centre for Drug Development (CRUK CDD) asked themselves this question. Up until this point they had normally reviewed projects at closeout, like many other organisations, with a workshop-type meeting and a formal report. These workshops could be 2 days in duration and required impartial facilitators. They were time consuming and expensive.

We interviewed Raffaella Mangano, Head of Study, Project and Portfolio Management, and Debora Joseph-Pietras, Project leader at CRUK CDD, to find out how they addressed this challenge.

What they envisioned was a lessons-learned philosophy that was ‘business as usual’ – or at least at milestones rather than waiting for a major exercise right at the close. Also, in common with many organisations, when building a new way of working they wanted the captured data to be centrally and easily shareable, to improve knowledge sharing and process improvement.

Things got started with a discussion including project and function leaders. The concept that emerged was a proposed regime of routine, event-driven collection of lessons, guided by a comprehensive set of categories. The principles of capturing lessons were established as:

• When: throughout the lifecycle of the project – as events occurred / issues arose

• Who: any member of the project team

• Where: a SharePoint-based lessons log

• How: The type of lessons identified being mapped to searchable categories, mapped to the project name, the phase, and critically – actions agreed.

Lessons Category screen

The key drivers for this process were to avoid repeating mistakes – so commonly a problem in our sector – and to feed into risk identification. To make this work, project teams are encouraged to discuss collated learnings at meetings; plus more in depth when new projects are transitioning into the later stage portfolio and at milestones. Filters were created in the tool to aid selection of relevant lessons.

It may sound straightforward to adopt this way of working. However, just announcing a new system design may not result in enthusiastic adoption by busy teams. CRUK CDD have done much more than this. They established an Oversight Team, that worked with project’s’ Leaders and Clinical Study managers, building agreement around their responsibilities for generating lessons learned; created guidance information used for the induction of new team members. Also appointed was a ‘champion’ to help and lend expertise to teams where required. There wasn’t just one launch! The system has been ‘launched’ several times, along with continuous consultation.

The Oversight Team monitors the whole system: archiving lessons sets that are expired; surveying usage, identifying themes and key trends – and keeping track of the implementation of solutions to issues arising.

What have been the positive outcomes so far from this initiative? It provides valuable information that can benefit studies; saves resource / time, and generates improvements to the organisation’s processes. There have been challenges: it remains tricky to prioritise this activity with every team; there is a lot of information now in the system, making it time consuming to navigate.

But refinements are on the agenda. In particular – making it easier to navigate.

CRUK CDD have generated a way of working that needs improvement, but that is a level of practice way in advance of many organisations in our sector.

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How robust is your Lessons Learned practice? There are several things you can do to enhance it: Ask a few of your colleagues to take our questionnaire, to identify where you need to improve: At anytime, contact PIPMG to discuss how we can help your organisation more effectively learn from experience.

John Faulkes