Overview
It’s important for project managers and team members to take stock at the end of a project and develop a list of lessons learned so that they don’t repeat their mistakes in the next project. Typically such reviews are called post-project reviews or “post mortems.” I recommend a two step process for conducting these reviews:
- First, prepare and circulate a whole bunch of specific questions about the project and give team members time to think about them and prepare their responses individually.
- Next, hold a meeting and discuss the team’s responses to the questions. The result of this discussion is often a list of “Lessons Learned.”
The benefit of the first step, done individually by team members, is that it allows the quieter, more analytical people to develop their responses to the questions without being interrupted by the more outgoing, vocal types who might otherwise dominate in the face-to-face meeting. Also, it allows everyone the time to create more thoughtful responses.
So what would be on the list of questions? I’ve provided some of my favorites below.
General Questions
- Are you proud of our finished deliverables (project work products)? If yes, what’s so good about them? If no, what’s wrong with them?
- What was the single most frustrating part of our project?
- How would you do things differently next time to avoid this frustration?
- What was the most gratifying or professionally satisfying part of the project?
- Which of our methods or processes worked particularly well?
- Which of our methods or processes were difficult or frustrating to use?
- If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the project, what would you change?
- Did our stakeholders, senior managers, customers, and sponsor(s) participate effectively? If not, how could we improve their participation?
The following are phase-specific questions (these will differ from project to project, depending on the life cycle/phases).
Phase I: Determine Need and Feasibility
- Did our needs/market analysis or feasibility study identify all the project deliverables that we eventually had to build? If not, what did we miss and how can we be sure our future analyses don’t miss such items?
- Did our needs/market analysis or feasibility study identify unnecessary deliverables? If so, how can we be sure our future analyses don’t make this mistake?
- How could we have improved our need-feasibility or analysis phase?
Comments