Good Post Mortem

You have just done a post mortem after a project. How do think, was it good? Or it went rather poorly?

If it was a bad post mortem you can probably feel that. People didn’t share their thoughts about a project or they did it just to have you off their back. You received a bunch of generalities and nothing surprised you on the whole list. Yes, you’d know if it was bad.

How do you know if it was good? The answer is: 5 minutes after finishing post mortem you just can’t know. Most of people could have made their homework adding their thoughts what had been good, what had been bad and should be improved in future. There could have been a discussion during presentation of the list on a team meeting. And you still can’t know.

It will be a good post mortem if you take its results and implement some improvements. When lessons learned are actually learned. Unfortunately sometimes a great beginning – whole work with thinking over whole project – is thrown into the trash, because no one ever looks at the post mortem results and does anything to improve things. That’s why you can judge post mortems after at least few months.

We’ve just started a great post mortem after a big project. First step has been done, as the outcome conclusions point quite lot areas to improve. We’ll see if we can change it to a good post mortem.

Tagged as: lessons learned, process improvement, project management