As business owners, operators and/or managers responsible for implementing initiatives, we sometimes overlook the value of learning something from our past projects. It is very understandable to ask for a post-mortem on a failed project. However, ask almost any Project Management Professional® to do a post-mortem on a successful project and you will probably get a strange look from them. Too often we focus on celebrating our successful projects (as we should) and talk minimally about why it was successful. While there is nothing wrong with celebrating a project's success, perhaps spending time finding out why it was successful will uncover valuable insights, which can be employed on future projects. A project post-mortem is not a simple lessons-learned meeting. It is an agenda-specific meeting where hard questions get asked about the project: "What went well? What did not?" Taking a hard, honest, and direct look with open communications will turn out to be a worthwhile investment in time, energy and money.
What Constitutes Project Success?
Every project is different, so delineating only one factor that determines success is extremely difficult, if not impossible. There can be a single factor, but more often than not, multiple factors are used. Determining success begins at project inception with a choice of who gets to make the decision, such as the sponsor, customer, end users, project manager or team members. Along with that decision, the factors used in making the distinction of if the project was successful are also determined and decided upon. These factors must be written to meet the S-M-A-R-T structure.
