One of the biggest risks in project closure is that valuable insight gets lost in conversation or left sitting in someone’s notebook.

A Project Review Template ensures that lessons are collected comprehensively and consistently across all projects. Instead of relying on memory or informal debriefs, this format guides reviewers to capture:

• Baseline vs. actual performance data — creating a factual delivery record.
• Outcomes delivered and outcomes still pending — linking back to the original business case.
• Open actions, residual risks, and handover responsibilities — ensuring nothing quietly slips into operational chaos.
• Structured lessons across governance, procurement, scope, risk, team dynamics, and stakeholder management — building a reusable intelligence base.
• Clear start/stop/continue recommendations — so lessons become actionable, not just written down.

When templates like this are used consistently, the organization builds a searchable body of structured data, not just scattered anecdotal reports.

Over time, this allows for pattern analysis across multiple projects — seeing where failure modes repeat, where governance consistently breaks down, or where particular methods consistently produce strong outcomes.

This is how organizations move beyond “we did a lessons learned session” to true capability maturity.

It transforms one-off project reflection into organizational memory that future teams can actually use.

If you’re building a project portfolio governance library or lessons learned database, this template (or one like it) becomes the backbone of that system — ensuring insights are comparable, traceable, and reusable, instead of being lost as disconnected narratives.