When the project is done, it is easy to simply slip into planning for the next project, whether because you have pressing deadlines, or you are looking for the next challenge. Seasoned project managers know the risk of skipping the project close, or postmortem, and ensure that they and their teams always take time to reflect, share insights, and document lessons learned. With the increase in remote teams, Project Managers must blend best practices for project close meetings with considerations of virtual meetings.
At the foundation, the postmortem is about looking back to capture insights to improve work in the future. It has similarities to an Agile project’s Retrospective but is specific to the Waterfall/traditional project methodologies.
|
Characteristic |
Postmortem |
Retrospective |
|
Methodology |
Waterfall |
Agile |
|
Purpose |
review all of past effort within project, both success and failures |
review recent past effort including both the successes and failures |
|
Frequency |
Repeating throughout overall effort; once per iteration |
At close when all efforts have stopped |
|
Output |
Documentation of project lessons learned and results; often stored in knowledgebase and/or available to any project team |
Action items to apply to the next round of work; specific to the work and often only shared with immediate team members |
As you would with a client or stakeholder meeting, you need to plan beforehand to better ensure success.
The communication about expectations, the agenda outline, and the online questionnaire tool can become templates you use across projects with a few tweaks.
As the facilitator for the postmortem, be very conscious that you set the tone for the team’s engagement and participation. Be positive, be focused, and keep things constructive. It is your responsibility to ensure everyone has an opportunity to contribute in an respectful, organized manner. Incorporate questionnaire feedback to show you are listening to all input; leverage the chat tool to call forward input from those that do not feel comfortable speaking with a large group. It is not a meeting about deadlines and assigning tasks. The postmortem is a knowledge sharing discussion.
Use your agenda to guide the meeting. The majority of time should be on the discussion of wins/failures; that is also the hardest part of a postmortem as you are encouraging candor and that can lead to strong feelings. The questions you use can help you guide the discussion so that it is productive and not just a complaint session. Consider these questions from Karla Cook’s “How to run a Seriously Productive Project Post-Mortem”:
Through the discussions, you should be actively listening for actions to take to do things differently in the future. Your action items need to be specific, not “let’s just do better next time.”
The postmortem is more than a milestone for documentation, it is an important part of team building and modeling a growth mindset. The project close meeting, or postmortem, is included in Project Management Fundamental training because of the importance of it within the overall project effort. With purposeful consideration of the virtual environment, you can create a powerful team sharing session that fosters trust and prepares for future success.