Lessons Learned

Overview — What Others Should Know

A lesson learned is something worth passing on beyond this assessment — an insight about how the work was done, or a finding with relevance elsewhere in the fleet.

Observations and recommendations belong to their activity. Lessons learned are written to travel: they appear in the shared Lessons Learned Review library, where colleagues from other activities and other utilities can read them and mark that they agree.

Open Lessons Learned from the activity's menu. Needs Lessons Learned access.

HEADS UP This page does not autosave. Use the save button.

Recording a Lesson

Use Add New Lesson Learned. Each lesson has three parts:

Field	What it holds
Lesson text	The lesson itself.
Lesson Tag	A tag categorising it, chosen from the available list. Required.
Public / Private	A toggle controlling who can see it.

PRO TIP Write the lesson so it makes sense to someone who knows nothing about your activity, your site, or your assessment. Internal shorthand, unit numbers, and local role names all make a lesson unusable to exactly the audience it was written for.

PRO TIP Say what happened, what you learned, and what someone else should do differently. A lesson that only records what happened leaves the reader to work out the point — and most will not.

Public or Private

The toggle now states its current setting explicitly and is colour-coded, so there is no ambiguity about which way it is set:

· It reads (Currently: Public) or (Currently: Private).

· Green for Public, red for Private.

· The saved lesson carries a chip showing its state when you browse the list.

Setting	Who sees it
Public	Shared beyond your utility, into the wider Lessons Learned Review library.
Private	Kept within your own utility.

HEADS UP Set this deliberately on every lesson. Public means readable outside your organization — so a lesson naming a specific failure, a contractor, or an identifiable individual should be Private. Check the toggle reads what you intend before saving.

PRO TIP Most genuinely useful lessons can be written to be shareable. Describe the pattern rather than the incident — "assessments that schedule interviews across shift changes lose participants" travels safely; the same lesson naming the crew involved does not.

Finding and Editing Lessons

Lessons are shown one at a time with paging. Above them:

Control	What it does
Search	Free-text search across lessons.
Filter by Tag	Narrows to particular tags.
Filter by Visibility	All, Public only, or Private only.
From Date / To Date	Narrows to a date range.
Edit current Lesson Learned	Opens the displayed lesson for changes.

PRO TIP Filter by Visibility → Public and read your activity's lessons as an outsider would. It is the quickest way to catch a lesson that is either too local to be useful or too specific to be shared.

Exporting

Export Lessons Learned to Excel downloads lessons as a workbook, using the filters in the export dialog — activity, tag, visibility, and date range.

An Export PDF button produces a formatted PDF of the activity's lessons, with the usual options: include themes and ratings, colour output, Full or Summary detail, a None / Draft / Confidential watermark, and an optional password.

HEADS UP The Excel export dialog's filters are separate from the ones you were browsing with. Narrowing the page to one tag does not narrow the export — set them again inside the dialog.

HEADS UP Set Visibility deliberately before exporting anything you intend to circulate. Leaving it at All puts private lessons into a workbook that may travel further than they should. The same caution applies to the PDF.

PRO TIP Excel for analysis and for the administrator's cross-activity library work; PDF for circulating a readable set to a management team.

The Shared Library

Lessons appear in Lessons Learned Review, reachable from the sidebar outside any activity. There, colleagues can read lessons and mark 👍 I Agree on ones matching their own experience.

PRO TIP Endorsements are what make a lesson carry weight. A lesson agreed with by fifteen people across six utilities is evidence of a systemic pattern; the same lesson recorded once is one team's experience.

GOOD TO KNOW Lessons Learned Review is hidden from COG Admins by design. If an administrator colleague cannot find it, that is expected.

Observations, Recommendations, and Lessons

Record	Answers	Audience
Observation	What did we find?	This assessment
Recommendation	What should be done?	This organization
Lesson Learned	What should others know?	Everyone else

PRO TIP Not every finding deserves a lesson. Ask whether a team at a different site, next year, would genuinely benefit. If the answer is no, it was an observation — and a library full of site-specific detail is one nobody reads.

HEADS UP Write lessons before the activity is locked. The reflective part of an assessment is the easiest to postpone until it is too late.

Common Problems

What you see	What it means
Lessons Learned missing from the activity menu	You have no lessons learned read access, or the activity is locked.
Add New Lesson Learned missing	Read access without write.
Save disabled	Lesson Tag is required and has not been chosen.
No autosave chip on this page	Correct — this page does not autosave. Use the save button.
Unsure whether a lesson is public	The toggle states it — (Currently: Public) or (Currently: Private) — and is green or red.
A lesson is not in the shared library	It is Private, or the library's filters are excluding it.
Private lessons in a shared export	Visibility was left at All. Re-export with Public only.
The export contains more than expected	The dialog's filters are separate from the browsing filters.
The tag you want is not available	Tags come from a set list. Pick the closest, or ask an administrator.
Everything read-only	Read access without write, or the activity is locked.

Revision #2
Created 2026-08-18 20:23:02 UTC by Ashutosh Mody
Updated 2026-08-19 20:07:14 UTC by Ashutosh Mody