Tips for Conducting Project Post Mortems
In this month's newsletter, we discuss tips for objectively determining
how your project went, upon the completion of your project. This is
referred to as the "Post Mortem" phase of the project, and it is good practice
to revisit the project to determine the things you did well and the things that
should be improved for your next project. This newsletter will aid you in preparing
a project "Post Mortem" report.
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Tips for Conducting Project Post
Mortems
Very few projects go as planned. Many
projects encounter problems that must be corrected and a few lucky projects go
smoother than planned. Regardless of how successful or disastrous a
project is, it is important to review the project in detail once the project is
over. This allows your team to figure out what things were done well and
to document the things that need improvement. It also aids in building a
knowledge base that teams coming behind you can review to ensure they get the
most out of their upcoming projects.
The key to a successful projects is to learn
from past mistakes. Below is a list of 5 Tips for conducting successful
Post Mortem reviews:
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Plan Your Post Mortem Review - Upon
completion of a project, the Project Manager should conduct a "Post Mortem"
review. This is where the Project Manager invites all the major players of
the team (Analysts, Lead Programmers, Quality Assurance Leaders, Production
Support Leaders, etc) to a meeting to review the successes and failures of the
project.
-
Require Team Participation - Ask the
attendees to bring a list of 2 items that were done well during the project and
2 things that could be improved upon.
-
Hold the Post Mortem Review Meeting - Go
around the table and have each person to discuss the 4 items they brought to the
meeting. Keep track of how many duplicate items you get from each team
member. At the end of the round table discussion of items, you should have
a count of the most popular items that were done well and the most agreed upon
items that need improvement. Discuss the top 10 success items and the top
10 items that need improvement.
-
List Items Done Well and Things Needing
Improvement -Upon listing of the 10 success and improvement items, discuss
specific things that can be done to avoid the items that need improvement upon
the next release. If some items need more investigation, assign specific
individuals to finding solutions.
-
Create a Post Mortem Report - The best
way to keep this information organized is to create a "Post Mortem" report,
where you document your findings. Send the Post Mortem report to all team
members. Before team members embark on their next project, make sure they review
the Post Mortem report from the prior project to gain insight from the prior
project. We have created a template that you can use for the document,
download it by clicking
here.
As you can see, an organized Post Mortem phase bears many
rewards. Below are some
helpful templates to aid you in developing software solutions on-time and
on-budget:
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