Post-Project Reviews: July 2020

Congratulations! It is the last day of the project, and you’ve completed all your deliverables. The team has done some really good work. You had a few roadblocks at the beginning, and that midpoint milestone was missed by a couple of days, but you got there in the end. The client said they are happy. You’re looking forward to a well-earned break before your next assignment.

There’s one more thing you need to do. Get the team and the client together to do a post-project review. Do it now while things are still fresh in everyone’s mind and you’re all together in the same place. Now, before everyone gets distracted by the next challenge, and before you all head off to the airport for your flights home (or before you close down the webex/MS teams/zoom/skype/etc. video link for everyone working remotely).

How should you go about doing the review to get the best insights? Here are three suggestions. Ready? Here we go...

1.      Always do a review, after both delivery successes and failures

At a lot of consulting firms, project reviews are done only when there has been some significant delivery failure and impact to client satisfaction. Red flags go up. Senior partners responsible for delivery quality get mobilised. People start ducking for cover.

All this is unfortunate, because it inseparably links the concept of a post-project review with the stain of failure.

While certainly a review is warranted in cases of delivery quality issues, there’s actually even more to be learned from success. What did we do well, so we can be sure to do it again the next time?  What approach, style, or personal relationship did this client like? What new insight or methodology was generated that could help other projects (while respecting confidentiality)? Capturing these learnings is important to keep growing as a trusted consultant.

In addition, no matter how successful a project may have been, there is usually something, somewhere, that could have been done better. No project is 100 percent perfect. But we should always strive for 100 percent, and understanding the 5% or 10% that can be improved helps us to get closer. 

The review should use a broad range of project evaluation criteria. Your consulting firm or client may already have an assessment framework, and if so you should use it so that your project’s performance is more easily compared to others.  If you are a small firm or work on your own, the balanced scorecard framework is useful as a starting point. Some possible examples: 

• Customer measures – client satisfaction, benefit outcome, implementation underway, follow-on/extension projects signed.
• Financial measures – project delivery margin, invoices submitted and paid, risks managed.
• Team measures – delivery team satisfaction, new skills developed, team feedback and performance reviews complete.
• Operational measures – milestones met, contract deliverables completed, information captured to knowledge repositories, compliance with scope change control processes.

Learn from your failures, and learn even more from your successes.

2.      Involve your client

Particularly if you anticipate some difficult conversations, it might be tempting to perform a project review in isolation, with only the consulting team and maybe one or two independent people from your firm. Resist that temptation. The review will be an ideal time to get valuable feedback from your client, so involve them in the process. After all, their opinions are really the most important. If you can’t trust the client to be honest with you, they will probably not trust you with their most difficult business problems.

The project review will also be a good chance for the client to learn something about how they managed their side of the project. Did they accurately specify their business requirements at the beginning?  Did they promptly evaluate and accept deliverables, helping the timely completion of milestones? Did they make the right stakeholders sufficiently available at the appropriate times?  If issues or barriers arose, did they quickly make the key decisions needed to continue progress?

Getting better at being a client greatly helps the consultants, and generates better project outcomes. Involve the clients in the review. 

3.      Honesty, warts and all, but not blame

At the beginning of the review meeting, agree some ground rules with all the participants. The session should be about an open, honest, warts-and-all discussion of any aspect of the project. After all, you are doing the review to learn, not to hide issues under the carpet. Any topic is valid; all opinions are valuable.

But, at no point during the review should the question of blame ever arise.  You are doing a project review, not an individual performance review. Ideally, you should isolate the project review documentation from the HR performance review process entirely. There will be opportunities on another day to consider if any HR rewards, or counselling, are needed. 

For now, just concentrate on the project so that you can learn from successes and fix any problems, not affix any blame.

Conclusion

The project review is an important part of the end-to-end project lifecycle. Reserve enough time at the end of the project to discuss what went well, what could have improved, and what you might have done differently. On a long project, do several reviews at relevant milestones during the project, so that you can capture learnings along the way. 

Review both successes and failures. Involve the clients. Be honest, and do not affix blame. You’ll be a better consultant.

In next month’s article:  Flight simulator your difficult consulting conversations.

Did you like this article? What things have you learned about being a better consultant? Contact me at [email protected].

Scott Frederick is Managing Director of Barkley Services, providing short term or part-time consulting services in business analytics, sales and marketing, business strategy and planning, change management, and process automation and outsourcing. Scott is based in Brisbane Australia and has over 30 years’ experience in management consulting.