Guide 11: How to Carry Out Project Post-Mortems

Price: € 195 - Free to ETP/IP Subcribers

Guide 11: How to Carry Out Project Post-Mortems

What's this Guide about?

This Guide shows you how to carry out project post-mortems or post-project reviews or project audits or after-action reviews ( AAR 's in military terminology) or (perhaps the best name of all) opportunities for improvement.

1 How to Do a Project Post-Mortem

Tell l everybody who was involved in the project – team, customer, management and any other stakeholders – that you are doing a post-mortem to round out the project. Ask them for a contribution. Tell them you want them to be blunt, and that all the submissions will be gathered together into a final document which will be published. Those inside the company will get the whole document; those outside will get a version which has had any stuff confidential to your company removed. (This latter allows you to involve the customer, subcontractors or any other outside organizations, but still be the final arbiter of what goes to them.) Participation is optional and anonymity is allowed.

Give them some simple guidelines:

• You're expecting 1-3 pages.
• Essentially you want them to write a ‘how was it for you?' essay. You want them to give their story of the project.
• They should give both positives and negatives; what was done well, what was done badly.
• You're particularly interested in any rules of thumb or other estimating type data that may be of value to other members of the team.
• Ask them to list the #1 or top three key lessons they would take away from the project.
• Give them a closing date for submissions.

In the meantime write …

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• What's this Guide about?
• How is the Guide structured?
  1 How to Do a Project Post-Mortem
  2 Example / Template for a Post-Mortem
  2.1 Introduction
  2.2 The story of the project
  

What you get

• The Guide itself
• • Estimating Score Card template