Lessons Log
The Project Office › Parcel A (Phase 1) › Project log › Lessons Log
- Entries 42
- New 21 Oct 7
Lessons that may be useful to this project or to future work, with the fields the PRINCE2 7 lessons log sets.
Lessons logged 21 October 2026 (our own slips)
7 lessons · PL-19 to PL-25
| Ref. | Lesson type | Lesson detail | Date logged | Logged by | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PL-19 | Reading a linked record | On 21 Oct a linked email thread was checked only at the message the link jumped to (14 Nov 2025). The thread opens with the Executive’s 16 Aug 2016 email to a solicitor, which raises the burials found under the farm. We reported that the link did not mention 2016; that was wrong, and was corrected at 20:12. Action: Read a linked thread from its first message before saying what it contains. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | High |
| PL-20 | Settled facts | The constituency MP was given as Stephen Doughty, then “corrected” to Kanishka Narayan from an address in a letter, then reversed back to Doughty after the MP’s office’s own written redirect (17 Nov 2025) was found. Settled: Doughty is the MP for the home and the farm. Action: Constituency facts come from the MP’s office’s written record, not inferred from an address. One correction, with the evidence, not two. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | High |
| PL-21 | Our own wording | The Executive asked when the MP said HM Land Registry was “considering” his complaint. We first said we could not find it; two minutes later we found the word was ours, written in a reply-sprint reply that had already been flagged as loose. Action: Search our own sent mail first when asked where a phrase came from. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | High |
| PL-22 | Unchecked press lines | Version 5 of the press pitch said the burials were “on the agenda” and “the largest such cemetery in Wales” before either was checked. Caught one minute later. The agenda (Item 10(b)) does cite the 1,026 burials; “largest in Wales” is not in the 2005 abstract and was dropped. Action: Every figure and claim in outward text is checked against its source before the draft is shown. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | High |
| PL-23 | Recording versus publishing | Care over public wording led to concerns being left out of the project record (Executive, 20:16). Action: Every concern goes into the issue register; full wording is held in the private control record; wording care applies to what is published, never to what is recorded. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | High |
| PL-24 | Shared accounts | Four workers read the same Gmail account at once; calls slowed to about 45 s and timed out. Action: Schedule one Gmail-heavy worker at a time; share the inventory file. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Medium |
| PL-25 | Listening first | “Not told where or when” was dropped from the pitch because the 13 Oct email had sent the agenda; the Executive’s point was that he had to ask for it, which the record (“as requested”) supports. Action: Ask what is meant before treating the record as contradicting the Executive. Status: APPLIED. | 21 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Medium |
Lessons
35 lessons
| Ref. | Lesson type | Lesson detail | Date logged | Logged by | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| L-001 | All P1/P2-C work | An acknowledgement or administrative closure is not evidential closure. Action: Acceptance test before completion. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-002 | WP-01 / WP-12 | Reviews stay separate from the underlying request. Action: One case trail per review. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-003 | P2-T / HMLR | External responses can conflict with earlier chronology. Action: Contradiction becomes an issue. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-004 | P4 | Museum work must not wait for legal/FOI completion. Action: P4 staged independently. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-005 | All outputs | Public reporting must preserve uncertainty. Action: Status labels and source links. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-006 | All research | Other AIs’ outputs contain errors (18 Oct Gemini PDF). Action: Leads only until checked against the original. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-007 | Comms | Changing the update cadence silently broke trust (18 Oct). Action: Cadence changes only with the Executive’s agreement. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-008 | All pages | Agent wording went beyond the 1939 document (I-008). Action: Write only what the document shows. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-009 | All agents | Two agents sweeping the wiki at once caused a tug-of-war. Action: One sweep at a time; collision guard. Status: OPEN — needs I-006. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-010 | All research | A matching name is not a matching farm (Ynysawdre 1878; Cowbridge Great House; Llandough Farm). Action: Confirm place, parish and household before cataloguing; out-of-scope finds go to Kissed Frogs. Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-011 | All research | A record can label the farm differently (1881 “Home Farm”). Action: Corroborate by household across directories and press before linking ( EV-0225 ). Status: APPLIED. | Before 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-012 | Project | Drafts were addressed to doors that never answer ([email protected]; a press office; a legacy address) Action: Use the address the body last replied from; verify on its site. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-013 | Project | A search snippet is not a read source (a 1958 line broke off at “have walked…”) Action: Mark SNIPPET ONLY; quote only readable text. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-014 | Project | Drafts already sent were still scheduled Action: Check Sent before scheduling. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-015 | Project | A body’s new letter changes every draft to it Action: Read the reply and attachments before any send to that body. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-016 | Project | Re-asking for what was answered gets a s.14(2) refusal Action: Duplicate check; review instead of a new request. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| L-017 | Project | A failing connector is not a dead end Action: Try another route; record what each returned. Status: APPLIED. | 19 Oct 2026 | Not recorded | Not recorded |
| PL-01 | Project | The coordinating thread stalled from about 04:00 to 14:25 BST; workers finished but no update went out for about ten hours, and scheduled loop runs were missed. Rule change: Long work belongs in workers, never in the coordinating thread; any gap over two hours gets a one-line status; stalls are logged honestly. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-02 | Project | An email to a council clerk was sent as a reply that re-quoted an earlier email the clerk had been asked to disregard, including a leftover editing note. A correction went out the same day. Rule change: Send as a new message or strip quoted history; check the full outgoing text, quoted parts included. Emails are now drafts only, sent by the Executive. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-03 | Project | After the e-book price moved from £9.99 to £49.99, scheduled posts still carried £9.99 in their captions and on screen. Rule change: Any price or fact change triggers a sweep of everything scheduled or queued before it is called done. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-04 | Project | Platform interfaces refused calls (rate limits and gateway errors) when several workers ran at once; identical retries were refused as repeats. Rule change: Pace about one call a second; back off; vary retries; after an unknown write, search before re-creating so nothing is duplicated. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-05 | Project | The first Legal Wiki e-book printed a surname for Branwen. Rule change: The privacy check looks for any surname after Branwen; every book is checked on its final text. | 19 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-06 | Project | A mirror homepage carried a banned phrase in copied text. Rule change: Banned-words check on every publish, mirrors and copies included. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-07 | Project | One request offered to pay copying charges and two asked for costs, against the no-spending tolerance. Rule change: Email checks look for payment, quotation and cost wording; no email may commit to pay. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-08 | Project | An escalation ladder suggested a question to a successor law firm; the sent mail showed the original firm had already been written to, and another firm's archive had already been asked. Rule change: Before drafting from a ladder rung, search sent mail and drafts and re-check the rung's premise. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-09 | Project | A brief gave an email's time in the wrong zone (UTC read as BST). Rule change: Every time in a brief or log names its zone. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-10 | Project | After one failed write, the platform gateway refused an identical retry as a repeat, and a gateway error on a write did not mean nothing had been created. Rule change: Read the target’s state before retrying; retry with a request that differs; never assume a failed write left nothing behind. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-11 | Project | After a price change, the old price stayed on eight surfaces because prices were typed into several generators and hand-kept pages. Rule change: Read prices from one source file; on any change, search every branch and the Legal Wiki for the old figure before calling it done. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-12 | Project | Archive-visit photos were nearly published. The Glamorgan Archives private-photography undertaking forbids publishing them without the Archivist’s written authority. Rule change: No archive-visit photo goes on any public site until that written authority is on file. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-13 | Project | A plan was captioned “1877” and tied to the 1877 agreement because of a neighbouring file name on the Legal Wiki; its date and origin are unknown. Rule change: Never take a document’s date or source from a file name or a neighbouring item; write “date and origin unknown” until the document itself is read. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-14 | Project | One home-page check read a 281k-row log on every visit; about 18 visits used a shared database’s daily read allowance and took unrelated services down until midnight UTC. Rule change: Every per-visit query is bounded and indexed; daily read counts are watched for each database. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-15 | Project | A rate limit held at the network edge let four comments through in ten seconds. Rule change: Keep rate-limit counters in durable storage under a daily salted hash, deleted after a day. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-16 | Project | Styling saved on the hosted Legal Wiki was stored but never reached the live pages. Rule change: Check styling in the live page; use inline blocks on that plan. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-17 | Project | A generated site nearly went out with merge markers and a stale copy of a shared script. Rule change: Search for merge markers before each commit; regenerate from the builder instead of merging generated files by hand. | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
| PL-18 | Project | An archive card gave “Nancy about 1910”; the GRO index gives 10 August 1913. Two daughters were registered Mary, and two adult Fredericks overlap from 1958 to 1967. Rule change: Treat catalogue labels as leads and confirm dates in the GRO indexes; identify each person by date, title and relationship before relying on a record (Issue I-032). | 20 Oct 2026 | Project Manager | Not recorded |
PRINCE2 7 outlines: sources · product set · archive