What are the benefits of conducting a project post-mortem?

Every project is a journey, and there will always be numerous contributions big and small from various stakeholders. In addition to acknowledging all the highs, it will tremendously help improve the process by acknowledging the lows too.

A good post-mortem can also be used as proof of achievements by the team for end of year reviews. The post-mortem should contains what the team did well and the benefits their work provided.

A project post-mortem is a systematic review that involves detailed analysis of the project's lifecycle, objectives, processes, outcomes and performance. Celebrate success and recognize achievement is an essential process for maintaining high team morale and motivation. When the team see their hard work acknowledged and celebrated, it instills a sense of pride and boosts their enthusiasm for future projects. Recognizing individual and collective achievements contributes to building a positive culture that values and acknowledges contribution and is likely to succeed when it comes to collaboration and innovation. Taking time to celebrate success is more than just a feel-good exercise, its an investment in the teams growth.

It cannot wait till the end! Project should have a regular cadence for reward & recognition (like quarterly or monthly, whatever works best). Also, every milestone should be recognized, It motivates holistically as a team and builds solid foundation to move ahead.

Project post mortem helps in analysing the projects wins and losses. This will help the team to celebrate their success and retrospect on their shortccomings.

Having an honest review of the efforts and strategies used on a Project is critical to developing and improving the best practices to utilize. Reflection on specific moments, or constructs, that developed in a Project and how it was handles allows for the development of an experience based playbook for future reference. Identifying problems and failures, and even successes, and digging into the actions and results will develop well considered guidance for future conflicts and establish a better understanding and estimation of the associated risks.

Successful projects may not need much of a reviews.Mostly it ends in celebration.However , success or failure all critical events are to be properly recorded. In the case highly risky projects like Space related activities there will post flight reviews and all inputs properly analysed and reasons for failures clearly understood , so that corrective actions are taken in subsequent projects. Expert committees will go through all data and clearly work out guidelines for future. All innovations in the execution of the project need to be properly documented.

root Cause analysis in project post mortem is not that much beneficial for project, it is for future projects. So the RCA(Root Cause Analysis) must be done as part of risk and issue management and must be documented. In this way there would be very less effort of RCA in the project post mortum. As the Duration of Project post mortem is usually very small so project team do not have time to do all these in this session.

From my experience, the most helpful way to analyze problems and failures is working backwards: list the most significant issues and group these problems according to whether they were solved, partly solved or not solved at all and rank them according to the negative impact. After that, work backwards to identify the root cause of why the problems haven't been solved. TheThe most common factors to explore are: 1. Incomplete information. 2. Poor communication. 3. Resource constraints. 4. Inadequate planning. 5. Scope creep. 6. Cultural / Organizational issues: resistance to change, culture of closed communications). 7. External factors: regulatory changes, market shifts, or unexpected events.

Identifying problems, roadblocks and bottlenecks is a fundamental step in a project post-mortem journey towards excellence. While it might be tempting to gloss over issues, addressing them head-on is where real growth happens. A thorough analysis of problems and failures equips us with valuable insights that guide better decision making. Failures are not setbacks; they are stepping stones to success and when we analyze our failures, we unearth valuable lessons that provide deeper insights on the projects complexities. Openly discussing problems and failures encourages a culture of transparency where team feel empowered to share their experiences. It should not be about assigning blame but about harnessing the power of adversity.

Doing a project post-mortem is a critical step in preparing for your next Project for a newly started Project. By taking the pots-mortem as a 'Lessons Learned' approach, Ways of Working can be implemented to ensure the team is operating in an efficient collaborative manner, introducing new techniques and processes. Tasks and activities that were found to take up the most time and resources can be prioritized and increased short term resourcing could be onboarded to support and mitigate any delays. Any Tools that would have supported the Project can be agreed and onboarded in advance of a new Project commencing or at the beginning to allow for licensing agreements, training of new staff and access to be ready in a timely manner.

This should again be a regular cadence, something like a scrum of scrums, where knowledge and best practices are shared regularly. Not only to the benefit of the PMs own project, but also for the benefit of the wider group and eventually best practices get added to organizational knowledge base.

Actually I agreed to this point but this is only valid for future projects and competency enhancement of project teams for future projects.which in return results in more experienced teams.

Best way to capture this is through collaborative tools like JIRA and confluence. Best practice is to create a dashboard in confluence which captures the project status, live metrics from JIRA and all the project artifacts and their signoffs. This helps in documenting and having live dashboard where all stakeholders can transparently take a look at project status. This also comes in very handy during audits (and you don’t have to scratch your head to find where that 8 month old signoff email is!)

This is one of the most significant parts of the post-mortem analysis of the project. Why? Because this stage takes place after all the wounds have been licked and distresses resolved. Hopefully. In this stage the true learning takes place as things will be named for what they are. The identification of what has been done wrong and right and careful noting of the causal relationship between the events and behaviour within the project facilitates the real growth and knowledge development.

Create content that can be shared internally (with more details on the project) and externally (more succinct content without commercially sensitive information). Imagine that you need to prepare a presentation for an external conference or to present your project to the senior business leaders at your company. Very often, you will present under one of these scenarios. Create a slide deck sharing the success and failure stories. Make sure that for failures, you strongly reflect to get insightful lessons learned. Structure your knowledge sharing as a story. Start with a hook by sharing something catchy from your project. For example: "How we spent an additional $70M to recover $100M of lost past investments".

Optimizing the closing phase of a project is a critical step in effective project management. Conducting a comprehensive project post-mortem to analyze the factors contributing to the project's success or failure is essential. This process aids every team member in comprehending the rationale behind the project's conclusion and serves as a valuable learning opportunity. Incorporating the lessons learned from the project's post-mortem enhances the team's capacity to either close out existing projects or seamlessly transition into new ones. This iterative approach ensures that each project becomes a stepping stone towards continuous improvement and success.

It is also good to remind the team to record any thoughts during the project that they may want to talk about after the project is done. Even in a 2 week sprint, ideas can be lost if not recorded. It will also help other team members jog their memory for what they experienced in the project. Sometimes it can also be effective to break away from the normal workplace to have this meeting. Other times, you can gamify the meeting to help people break out of their silence.

One needs to be careful while using the word post-mortem here i.e. team members will assemble at the end of the project. The fundamental drawback is: Most projects last months, and any complex project will easily span more than a year. If we wait till end, majority of what we want to share, would be lost. Not only because so much keeps coming everyday in a hectic env driven by constant change, but also because people keep moving out of project. There is so much information load and juggling priorities, it’s practically so difficult to recall months back. So whatever we are trying to achieve in the post-mortem should instead become a regular cadence so that learnings/root causes/artifacts are captured regularly without a lag.

This is more about the team culture you've built. How much team believes in this effort. For that Organization must invest in people and their competencies.

While it's a key activity of closing out a project, I believe post mortems (and I prefer the term Lessons Learned) can and should be performed throughout the life of a project. In particular with longer projects, maybe establish different phase or release points at which the team will review the successes and challenges.

The key is getting ready. I usually start by making a timeline that shows what tasks we had, the decisions we made, and what else was going on. This helps the team go back in time, review our assumptions, and find the important things we now recognize.

Talking about the knowledge database, through an internally developed Project Management support tool, I usually register: Highlights, Change Management items, Risks/Problems/Opportunities, follow-up of project phases, deliverables, among others, through specific tool's modules linked to these items. These items are registered with a classification linked to the constraints of the project: Schedule, Costs, Quality, among others. The data registered in these modules are compiled in another module called Knowledge DataBase. This data serves as input for analytical reports related to the project, in addition to serving as a basis for post-mortem meetings and even follow-up meetings throughout the different phases of the project.

I personally don't like the term: post mortem... Why we simply just called it project evaluation? At the end of the day what we look here is to get good feedback of the things that went well and the things that didn't. At this moment project is alive not "mortem" is finalized and starts to run. Anyway, is common practice so it will be difficult to change the name...

I think With the conduction of phase/project post mortum,it is also very important to create a culture of using organizational process assets.I have seen in many projects,where there is big data base and the teams rarely refer to those in the future projects and the documents such as lesson learned just become the requirement to be filled.Also the utilization of digital modes and softwares must be done as it makes easier for project teams to analyze previous repositories.

Conducting a project post-mortem offers several benefits, such as identifying successes and shortcomings, facilitating learning, and improving future projects. It allows teams to reflect on what went well and what could have been done better, leading to improved processes, enhanced collaboration, and more successful outcomes in future endeavors.

A significant benefit of conducting a post-mortem is the ability to critically evaluate whether the initial ROI was realized or not. This refers to the anticipated benefits and returns expected at inception which could include financial gains, improved efficiency, increased customer satisfaction or achieving strategic objectives. A post-mortem allows stakeholders to assess whether the project met its intended goals and if the anticipated returns were achieved. By evaluating outcomes against the initial ROI projections, valuable insights can be gained by firms into their investment decisions. It allows managers to identify aspects of the project that contributed to the shortfall and isolate factors which negatively impacted outcomes.