It’s no secret that the more times you do something, the better you get at it. The more projects you complete, the more you learn about the process- what mistakes you made that you don’t want to repeat, and what worked out well that you want to make sure you do again for the next project. This is where completing a postmortem can be helpful. You may find after reflecting on a few past projects that you need to allocate more time for the planning phase, or that your process for estimating budgets needs some tweaking.
Completing a postmortem is an opportunity for your team to discuss what went well during the project, mistakes to be avoided in future projects, and areas that could use some improvement. Whether you’re working on large or small projects, doing a postmortem can be beneficial by ensuring that you and your team understand the successes and pitfalls after each project is completed. This way you learn from your mistakes and can continually improve your process.
A good way to capture the information of a postmortem is by using forms in Daylite. You can create a postmortem form with all the necessary questions to ask your team and then complete this form at the end of a project. The form can be linked to your project for reference, as well as viewed with other project postmortem forms so you can analyze similarities.
Watch this tutorial video in our Help Centre to learn how to create and use custom forms. You can have a combination of yes or no answers, multiple choice, and open ended questions. When creating a form for a postmortem, some of the fields may be:
1. Was the project completed on time?
2. Was the project within the budget?
3. What went well?
4. What areas needed improvement?
5. What were some project highlights?
For additional questions to consider asking after a project, you can reference A PostMortem Template by Dwain Fagerberg at Last Bytes.
When following a pipeline for your project, you can reflect on each stage of the project to identify areas of success and areas that need some work. You may even find after doing a post-mortem that your pipeline needs some modification. Perhaps some tasks should have been completed earlier on in the project, or that some of your pipeline process can be streamlined to improve efficiency.
Reviewing postmortem forms can also help boost the morale of your company by focussing on and celebrating what you did well as a team, and working together to devise plans for improvement in the future.
