In the first two installments of best practices for postmortems, I touched on setting up a postmortem, Part I, and what goes into a postmortem, Part II. Today, I'll wrap up the series with closing thoughts on things to avoid and valuable next steps.
Items to avoid during a postmortem
There are some actions that do not help us improve on our processes and should be avoided in a postmortem:
- Do not call out individuals. The key is to identify what went wrong, not who caused the issue. Try and be as solution-oriented as possible.
- Do not go over the budgets in front of the whole team. If you feel it's necessary, cover schedules and talk about estimates, but we don't need to talk numbers with the entire team. Usually when we go over budget, it was from a larger planning issue that involved management.
What comes out of postmortem?
You must have a list of core action items after every postmortem. Otherwise the practice wasn't useful. Sometimes as an account service or project manager employee, you may not have a good idea for a solution to a technical problem. For these items, send out tasks to team leads in the other departments to help you formulate the list of action items. For each item, if possible to address immediately, have an owner and a timeline for completion. Other action items not immediately addressed will be reviewed by the management team and assigned appropriately.
TIP: Schedule a 15-minute meeting after the postmortem that includes only the project managers, account supervisor and team leads to make a list of action items while they're still fresh in everyone's mind.
Come up with a list of valuable lessons learned from the project, whether successes or failures, and be prepared to share with the company as a whole when appropriate. We want to expand this knowledge outside of the project team so the entire company can benefit from others who have the experience.