An ontological approach for Program Management Lessons Learned: Case study at Motorola Penang Design Centre

The Program Management Lessons Learned process helps organizations learn from past experiences and prevent similar mistakes in future projects. Current methods of capturing lessons learned through loosely defined questions and free flow templates often lead to unstructured documentations and information gathering. These drawbacks hamper efforts to retrieve and reuse meaningful and useful lessons learned information. This paper presents a newly developed ontological approach in the form of a template for capturing lessons learned in new electronic products design projects. The developed template embodies a source-impact-action (SIA) triple that categorizes knowledge in key learning and knowledge areas. A case study using the structured SIA-based template was successfully piloted at Motorola Penang Design Centre. Results of the SIA triple and its associated benefits shall be presented.