Situation
Projects are the core activity of your business unit and a post project review is required for each project. However, post project reviews are rarely done and where they are they are not done well. You have been asked to review the reasons for this and recommend improvements. Use the 9 Lenses to identify the issues and factors you should look for.
9 Lenses scan
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What happens to post project review information? Does anybody get any benefit from it? If so, who and how? Do we have some examples? What are the alternative ways of the capturing project learning? Does it always have to be in the form of a post project review? |
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The feedback between doing a post project review and seeing any benefit is often indirect and delayed. How can we create clear feedback that the post project review effort is worthwhile? Are post project reviews integrated with other forms of knowledge capture and sharing? If not, could they be? |
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Many of the lessons learned and problems solved occur during a project and it can be difficult to recall them clearly at the end of the project. Can we find an efficient way to capture lessons learned progressively? Project teams progressively disband and move on to other projects, they are not always readily available to be part of a post project review. |
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| What, if anything, are the current project teams doing for post reviews? What happens to the reports and information that are produced? | |
| Project leaders and members are mostly action and task oriented. The reflective post project review process is not a natural one for them and they will probably not feel comfortable with it. They will also probably not do it well. Do we need to facilitate the process? A form/template driven process will probably not be all that helpful. | |
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What incentive exists to do post project reviews? Are they supported by senior management? Is time formally allocated for the activity? Post project reviews can suffer from ‘hindsight bias’. Situations often look more straightforward and planned when looking back. Are they delivering enough practical benefit to motivate project leaders and management to support them? |
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Aspects of past successful examples include: assigned responsibility, continuous capture, inclusion of a review component to some project meetings, regular less formal catch-up meetings, a focus on lessons learned rather project review. Can some or all of these be incorporated in our approach? Are any project leaders doing post project reviews well and getting value from them? If so, can we learn from them? |
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| Are any of the projects teams doing anything surprising or unusual to review performance and identify lessons learned? | |
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