Once your team has completed a job, do you take the time to conduct a project post-mortem, or are you so busy that you simply rush on to the next task? If you aren’t pausing to evaluate what went right and what went wrong on a job, your team will be doomed to repeat itself and miss out on areas to improve.
Every job offers lessons your staff can learn from, and identifying root causes can help prevent issues from recurring.
Project post-mortems not only provide an opportunity to examine your mistakes but can also be a time for your team to celebrate your successes. This can boost team morale and reinforce positive behavior.
Who Should Be Involved in a Project Post-Mortem
Everyone who played a significant role in the project should participate in a post-mortem. This includes the project manager, crew leader, account manager or estimator, operations or branch manager and designer.
Each person will bring a different perspective to the meeting and can help ensure you’re reviewing the project comprehensively. If you frequently work with subcontractors or other companies, requesting their feedback can add additional perspective to the discussion.
While you obviously don’t need to invite your client to an internal post-mortem meeting, it is best to gather their perspective on the experience so you have an understanding of their viewpoint as well.
If your team tends to get into the weeds, consider including a moderator. This is someone on staff who wasn’t involved with the project and can ensure the team sticks to the agenda and conversations remain productive.
What to Review During a Post-Mortem
One way to structure your post-mortem meetings is around the major project phases.
With the planning phase, review whether the estimate was accurate and realistic, and if the client’s expectations were aligned from the start.
For the execution phase, discuss what caused any delays or rework. Talk with your team to see if they felt they had the right tools and equipment available. Also, talk about whether the team worked safely and productively and what factors allowed them to do so. If accidents or near misses did occur, assess what caused this to happen.
If the project was completed on time, explore what enabled the team to stay on target versus what may have put the crew behind and what could be done in the future to mitigate this.
A key element to review is the budget and profitability of the project. If the actual costs and hours varied greatly from the estimates, what caused these differences? Identify any unexpected expenses or change orders that occurred. In some cases, you may find a pattern of failing to charge clients for change orders.
Another factor to review is how effective was your internal communication. Were the transitions from departments smooth, or was the ball dropped? If communication breakdowns occurred, delve into how they can be avoided in the future.
Lastly, consider the client’s overall satisfaction with the project. Did you meet or exceed their expectations? Did they provide any positive or negative feedback during or after the project? All of this information can be used to improve the processes for your next project.
How to Make Post-Mortems Useful
To keep your team from only seeing post-mortems as just another meeting, you need to ensure they are implemented effectively.
Ideally, you should schedule your post-mortems to take place within a week of completing a job. This way the project is still fresh in people’s minds. Also, no project is too small to have a post-mortem. Consistently having a meeting for each job can help you identify overarching trends in your operations.
Develop a structured agenda so these meetings aren’t a vague hour of just complaining about what went wrong. One possible framework to use is outlining what practices you need to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing.
Avoid playing the blame game during your post-mortems. Instead of pointing fingers at who let the client down, focus on what went wrong and why. If a specific team member does need to be addressed, do it outside of the post-mortem meeting.
Ensure everyone feels comfortable sharing honest feedback during the meeting. Even if the team had a positive experience with a certain project and nothing in particular went wrong, dig deeper to figure out why that project went so smoothly so it can be replicated in the future.
While it is easier to point out the roadblocks or mistakes made, make a conscious effort to spot successes and celebrate these wins with the team.
After your team has discussed the various root causes and solutions, make sure to document and distribute these takeaways. Post-mortems do you no good if the findings are not incorporated into your processes moving forward.
Create clear, actionable steps and assign responsibility for seeing them implemented to ensure this time of reflection turns into actual change.
While project post-mortems take time, they also allow your organization to continuously refine your operations and deliver increased value to clients.
