*Project Retrospective Analysis:-
Khalid A. Elzairy, PfMP, PgMP, PMP, RMP,PBA,ACP,SP?,MSc, H.D
I'm a highly talented and proficient Civil/Structural Engineer with solid experience and knowledge in designing, supervising and construction for structural, infrastructure, and Marine projects.
Advice from the heart of projects:
Project Closure:-
There are a number of closure activities common to most technical projects, but the specifics vary a great deal with the type of project. Project close-out generally involves:-
- Formal acceptance of the project deliverables (for successful projects).
- The final written report.
- Close-out of all contracts, documents, and agreements for the project.
- Acknowledgement of contributions.
- A post project retrospective analysis to capture the lessons learned.
- A celebration or other event to commemorate the project.
The most relevant of these to risk management of the project or the future projects is the retrospective analysis.
*Project Retrospective Analysis:-
Managing project risk on an ongoing basis requires continuing process improvement. Whether you call this effort a retrospective meeting, lessons learned, a postmortem, a post project analysis, or something else, the objective is always the same: improving future projects and minimizing their risks. If the people
who led the projects before yours had done this more effectively, your project would have had fewer risks. the rule of "Help the next project leader out—it could be you". must be taken into consideration.
The overall process for a project retrospective analysis is similar to the project review process, but the focus is broader. Project reviews are concerned primarily with the remainder of the current project, using the experiences of the project so far to do ‘‘course corrections.’’ A retrospective analysis is backward-looking and more comprehensive, mining the history of your whole project for ideas to keep and processes to change in projects generally.
Before you schedule and conduct a project retrospective, get organizational commitment to act on at least one of the resulting change recommendations. Performing postproject analyses time after time that always discover the same process defects is worse than useless. It wastes the time of the meeting participants and is demotivating. Decide how you will use the resulting information before you commit resources to the analysis.
How to prepare for and schedule the project retrospective?
the answer is in the next article