Project Post-Mortem: Best Practices for a Successful Meeting

The project post-mortem is an excellent method for companies to foster experience and knowledge from completed projects.

Despite its importance, it can be a blind spot for agencies. How do you prepare for a retrospective meeting? How should it look, and what to do with the insights you’ve gathered?

This guide will lay down the basic ground rules to help you hold a productive post-mortem discussion.

A project post-mortem (PMA) is a structured meeting held after project completion. It’s a valuable tool for assessing the potential causes of project failure, sharing knowledge among team members, and identifying and developing action items for future projects.

During a post-mortem, all stakeholders, including project managers, team members, and often clients, come together to discuss the project’s outcomes in detail. They review objectives, processes, performance, and outcomes against the initial project goals. The meeting encourages an open and honest dialogue where participants can share their experiences without fear of blame.

Learn more: The End-to-End Process of Project Management

While the post-mortem meeting focuses on a retrospective review of the entire project, the premortem is a forward-looking approach. As a proactive strategy, it includes identifying and anticipating potential problems before the project kickoff. This type of risk analysis can have multiple benefits, from making teams and project managers more sensitive to potential risks during the process to preventing them in their entirety.

It’s important to note that holding a premortem doesn’t mean you should do away with a follow-up after the project’s completion. As a valuable tool for managing success and failure, the postmortem is a crucial part of a comprehensive approach to project management.
 

Post-mortem meetings allow agencies to develop institutional knowledge by providing an open platform for collaboration and communication.

During a post-mortem brief, project teams identify what went wrong, but also the underlying reasons for why something went wrong. This is often called a root-cause analysis, as it digs deep into the underlying issues or problems that cause a system, process, or activity to fail or perform poorly.

While a postmortem is focused mainly on project failures, it also helps identify and celebrate good practices that should be carried onto future projects.

This continuous cycle of evaluation and learning ensures that each project contributes to future business success, ultimately leading to improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness.
 

A post-mortem:

According to research, as many as 20% of IT companies do not conduct post-mortems, while more than 50% conduct them on fewer than half of their projects.

When it comes to the main reasons, managers reported reasons such as unavailable people, shortage of personnel qualified to conduct a proper analysis, lack of defined criteria, lack of time due to other projects, and more (A Defined Process for Project Postmortem Review).

Despite these challenges, the importance of conducting project post-mortems cannot be overstated. Not only does it help agencies analyze complex projects with many moving parts, but it’s also a valuable tool for smaller a mid-sized companies with limited resources to invest in their knowledge management.

By overcoming these barriers, teams can ensure continuous improvement, leading to more successful project management practices and better organizational performance.

Preparing post-mortem meetings includes setting an agenda, designating one or more moderators, and establishing the ground rules for how the discussion will be structured.

Once you’ve got the rough structure of your retrospective meeting, here are some best practices for avoiding post-mortem mistakes and achieving a successful discussion.

Building on the groundwork laid during the preparation of the post-mortem, the meeting leader should focus on addressing the key questions that help analyze the planning, execution, and project results. This can include topics such as:

If your PMA has a specific goal, such as improving your cost estimation and efficiency, the questions can be tailored to better reflect this.

Often, a project post mortem can look a little like a group therapy session. While this can be beneficial in some ways, if at least to make people feel heard and understood, it doesn’t go a long way towards providing actionable solutions.

This is why it’s essential to open the meeting with a positive mindset. Make an effort to highlight successes and what worked well. When the time comes to discuss issues, try to do so by focusing on developing strategies to resolve them.

This moves the discussion away from assigning blame or dwelling on mistakes and towards proactive problem-solving and improvement.

PMA should be open for participation to all project stakeholders. You can also encourage indirectly involved staff members to join in, though it might be beneficial to hold a separate session for them to focus specifically on insights or impacts relevant to their roles.

This approach allows for a broader spectrum of feedback and helps to gather diverse perspectives. Separating the discussions can also prevent the main session from becoming too unfocused.

Ultimately, this will depend on the aim of your PMA — whether it’s to discuss a specific project activity or goal or to create a comprehensive review of the project process.

The crucial thing is foster a non-threatening environment where participants feel free to express opinions without fear of criticism or repercussions.

A successful post-mortem avoids casting blame and instead focuses on constructive feedback and learning. To prevent the participants from turning defensive, the discussion should move away from punishment and blame and towards a strategic discussion of why, when, and how a failure occurred.

Source: Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture

This approach promotes a more objective analysis and helps team members feel comfortable sharing their experiences and insights, which is vital for identifying the root causes of issues and developing practical solutions.

The results of the meeting should be documented in a post-mortem report. This can include:

A post-mortem report ensures that all valuable insights and lessons shared during the meeting are preserved for later reference. It should be shared across all relevant stakeholders to increase the chance of it being used to drive process improvements.

This can contribute to historical and cross-project analysis, which is beneficial for gathering various types of agency data — for example, a client profitability analysis.

A successful postmortem is a crucial resources for recognizing project success and failure. As a tool for continuous improvement, it helps agencies enhance projects based on reliable data from multiple sources.

Post-mortems also improve collaboration and communication in the team. They reiterate a healthy workplace mindset where mistakes are understood and analyzed rather than punished.

To support your project post-mortem insights, consider investing in a comprehensive project management tool.

A modern software solution can help you analyze key points in the project timeline and glean insights into task completion times vs estimations, resource scheduling, and more.

If you’re interested, book a demo with Productive to learn more.

A post-mortem after a project is a review conducted to evaluate project successes and failures. It helps project teams and project leaders learn from past mistakes, identify areas for improvement, and gather insights to improve future projects and team collaboration.

Other words for project post-mortem include project retrospective, project debrief, project review, post-project analysis, and project post-implementation review.

To postmortem a project, its entire lifecycle needs to be reviewed. This includes the project inception, such as the desired goals, timelines and budget. You’ll identify what worked, what didn’t, and why. It’s an essential process for ensuring continuous improvement and business growth.

The benefits of a post-mortem process include learning from past mistakes and identifying systemic issues in your business workflows. It also promotes continuous improvement and enhances team collaboration for upcoming projects.