It can be difficult to stay focused on your project management continuous improvement efforts when you’re orchestrating multiple initiatives in different lifecycle stages. Everyone is busy and you might not feel there’s time to step back for a higher-level view. But project teams that want to achieve more consistent success need to prioritize the review of past projects so they can understand what’s working well and where they can do better. If you’re struggling to assess your past performance, then consider the strategies below that can help you elevate your project post-mortem process and stay on top of your continuous improvement program.
The people who worked on the project will have valuable experience to share as part of the process, but you should also invite team members who were not involved in the project to participate in your post-mortem exercise. You’ll gain a more objective view of your initiative’s performance by widening your project team to include input from members who didn’t contribute to the effort you’re reviewing. That might include project professionals who have been on your team for a while but were focused on other initiatives, plus newer members who weren’t with the organization when most of the project work occurred. These individuals can offer less-biased perspectives than those who were directly responsible for planning and executing the project, and perhaps bring some new ideas to help solve old problems.
In addition to pulling more members of your project team into the review process, it can also be helpful to ask groups outside of the project management function to participate. If you don’t already have standing invitations open to representatives of departments such as purchasing, accounting, legal, and HR on your post-mortem participant list, this is the time to expand your horizons. The experts in those disciplines can provide information and insights such as how to expedite the contract review process both internally and across your vendor base, ways to streamline your project hiring strategy based on the talent pool you want to target, and procurement tips to reduce unnecessary costs and boost your negotiating power.
Most post-mortems are conducted on a single project, and that’s an important step in the continuous improvement process. However, you may discover additional insights and lessons when you review several projects together. Bundling the exercise to encompass multiple projects—particularly when you’ve recently completed several that are linked as part of a wider overall plan—can give you a more comprehensive review and deliver visibility beyond what’s available in a one-project post-mortem. Evaluating trends across the firm’s connected projects will help you see things like how constraints in one initiative influenced work activities in another, or where budget overages could have been avoided if the team had access to portfolio-level information that was timelier or of better quality.
Consistently conducting post-mortems on every project is critical if you want to address issues and optimize results over the long term, but a one-and-done lookback shouldn’t be the end of your review process. Your team will learn even more valuable lessons and gain more actionable insights if you periodically pull out those old post-mortem reports and analyze them again. Looking at your larger project dataset will give you better visibility into trends over time. That might include spotting budget variances that only occur in specific types of projects, or staffing needs that only crop up when you use a particular vendor, for example. You may also identify opportunities to consolidate suppliers, increase your onsite stock of difficult-to-source materials, leverage additional types of data to negotiate more favorable contract terms, or direct resources more efficiently.
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