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Post-Mortem? What Post-Mortem?
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.
When I ask project managers about post-mortems, I often hear the feedback that they don’t do them. When I ask why, the answer is usually along the lines that they--or more commonly the organization--doesn’t see the value in them.
Really? Are post-mortems a complete waste of time and nobody told me, or is something else going on here?
The post-mortem death march
Let me paint a picture and see how many of you recognize it: A PM completes their first project and dutifully undertakes their company’s established post-mortem process. The team moans and complains, but the PM manages to complete the exercise with at least partial involvement from the stakeholders and team. The PM writes up all of the findings, makes recommendations, prioritizes actions and submits the report to the PMO and waits. And waits. And waits.
Sound familiar?
Too often, the recommendations from a project post-mortem are never acted upon; they get lost or are simply ignored. Sometimes they are simply dismissed as not relevant to other projects. It’s not surprising then that the next time the PM completes a project, they won’t put the same amount of effort into the post-mortem--and sooner or later they stop doing them altogether.
The role of the PMO in post-mortems
I’m assuming that the PMO is the project control authority in your …
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