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The Post Mortem: PI Style
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
It is one of the most dreaded parts of a project for the project manager--the post mortem. Call it a post implementation review, a lessons learned meeting or a project closedown discussion…we all know what it is. Too often it is an emotional exercise in finger pointing, and even if we manage to capture some key elements, senior management doesn’t do anything about it. Sound familiar to anyone?
It doesn’t have to be that way, however. The post mortem can be a wonderful opportunity to review not so much the “what” of the project, but more the “how”. Post mortems can be one of the best ways to bring business process improvement to your project methodology. It also has a tremendous side benefit” By focusing on the processes it depersonalizes the discussions and reduces finger pointing.
Gaining Insight: The Post Mortem
Let me be clear about one thing right from the start: As PMs, we cannot allow ourselves to think that the only time we have to think about improving our project processes is during a post mortem. We have a responsibility to be looking for ways to improve them all of the time, and if you aren’t doing that then you aren’t doing your job properly.
That said, the post mortem provides an opportunity to review the project and examine how changes to the processes may improve things. I …
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