Project completions feel great! You and your team put in a lot of hard work and delivered the output.
Now, it’s time to sigh in relief. 😮💨 But wait, there’s one job left: project post-mortem.
Without a post-mortem, you’re missing out on the opportunity to understand what went wrong and even what went right. Did the team experience task delays? Were there budget overruns or resource shortages?
If you don’t dig into the underlying issues now, you’ll likely run into them again with your next project.
So, how do you conduct an effective post-mortem? Don’t worry; we’ve broken it down in this article. Before we get into the steps, let’s discuss what a post-mortem is and its benefits.
How to Conduct A Successful Project Post-Mortem [Steps, Benefits, & Mistakes to Avoid]
⏰ 60-Second Summary
- A post-mortem is a project retrospective that allows you to review the project processes, successes, and failures so you can improve going forward
- It helps identify areas of improvement and boost team efficiency
- All key stakeholders, including project managers, developers, and quality assurance staff, should participate in project post-mortems
- Start by gathering honest feedback from the team via surveys or interviews and analyzing data to identify patterns
- Next, document project post-mortem findings in a comprehensive report, share the report with the stakeholders, and implement action items for future projects
Understanding Project Post-Mortem
For many companies, the project management lifecycle ends with hitting milestones and delivering results.
But here’s the thing: many teams skip one important step—assessing project challenges and wins. A post-mortem review helps you identify areas for improvement to raise the bar for your next project.
What is a project post-mortem?
Think of a project post-mortem like a team debrief after a big event where you bring key stakeholders together to reflect on the project’s journey.
Just like you sit with your journal in December to reflect on the entire year’s ups and downs, a post-mortem meeting allows you to celebrate project achievements and learn from your mistakes.
It provides an opportunity to brainstorm ideas and document best practices that can help with your upcoming projects and improve future outcomes.
Benefits of conducting a project post-mortem
A study on IT project post-mortems reveals that, “post-mortem analysis is not a general practice in IT project management process.”
You might think post-mortems are just another task on your already full to-do list, especially when you’ve got new projects lined up.
But conducting them pays off well. Here are a few benefits:
1. Spot mistakes and learn from them
Every project, no matter how successful, has its bumps along the way. Post-mortems give you a dedicated time to reflect on what went wrong and why. When you take the time to review mistakes, be it missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, or unexpected roadblocks, you take valuable lessons.
The key is asking the right questions:
- What could we have done differently?
- What systems or processes failed us?
- Which strategies, tools, or processes worked effectively?
💡Pro Tip: Use tools like lessons-learned templates to analyze and document project accomplishments and setbacks. This kind of introspection can turn mistakes into opportunities to strengthen your team and processes, making your future projects smoother and more successful.
2. Improve team efficiency
A project team can work more quickly and efficiently because they’ve analyzed where and how to reduce time to avoid delayed project delivery. You can identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and processes that slowed the team down.
Let’s say a project took longer than expected due to approval delays. In the post-mortem, you could analyze why approvals took so long—maybe the process was too complicated, or project team members weren’t clear on what was needed. From there, you can simplify the approval process for future projects, saving time and avoiding similar delays.
🧠 Did you know? A team led by Prof. Colin Eden at Strathclyde conducted post-mortems on a range of complex projects (including railway, aerospace, and civil engineering) for over 9 years. This helped them establish the causality story in a project, understand the effects of the dynamic behavior of multiple stakeholders, and set up systems and feedback loops to avoid delays and disruptions.
3. Boost team morale
Post-mortems are more than identifying mistakes and analyzing their root causes. You acknowledge and celebrate team efforts and help team members recognize their shortcomings in a supportive and non-judgmental environment.
This makes the meeting feel less like a ‘blame game’ and more like a valuable learning experience.
For example, if your team successfully met deadlines despite a challenging project scope, take the time to acknowledge that achievement. Highlighting small wins, like creative problem-solving or a key milestone reached, reinforces a culture of appreciation.
When team members feel recognized, they’re more likely to stay engaged and motivated, ensuring better collaboration in future projects.
4. Promote continuous improvement
Project post-mortems are a systematic review of project outcomes to identify weaknesses and areas where processes can be fine-tuned for better results in the future.
Suppose you identify that frequent communication breakdowns led to delayed project execution and missed deadlines. Discuss these challenges in the post-mortem meeting to establish communication channels and guidelines.
🧠 Did you know? Raymond Sheen, President of Product and Process Innovation Inc., highlights an incident involving Chris, a reactive problem solver, and Pat, a proactive planner.
Pat launched the project on time by preventing issues, while Chris delayed it by reacting to problems. Without a post-mortem analysis, the company overlooked Pat’s proactive approach and let her go during downsizing. This highlights the importance of post-mortem analysis in recognizing proactive problem-solving.
Now that you understand the benefits of project post-mortem, let’s take a quick look at the participants of such meetings.
Who Should Participate in a Project Post-Mortem?
Project post-mortems typically involve all the key stakeholders, including project managers, team members, vendors, clients, subject matter experts, and technical leads. Here’s why you need them:
- Project leaders or managers to organize the meeting, discuss timelines and goals, and conduct project evaluation for identifying what worked and what didn’t
- Developers to share technical insights and bottlenecks faced during the project
- Product managers to discuss perspectives on user requirements, market trends, and customer needs
- Quality Assurance (QA) staff to highlight testing and quality control issues
- Clients to offer valuable feedback on the project outcomes
- Support team to collect user feedback and identify support issues
Additionally, you can involve indirect staff members in the meeting to gather diverse perspectives and share valuable insights on standard project processes.
How to Conduct a Successful Project Post-Mortem?
The most impactful post-mortems are well-structured and focus on actionable outcomes.
Establishing a clear post-mortem process doesn’t have to be overwhelming—it’s about setting the stage for honest discussions and process improvements.
Before everything else, set the meeting agenda.
It could be ‘Compare project objectives vs. actual outcomes’ or ‘Evaluate workflow bottlenecks and propose optimization strategies.’ Your post-mortem meeting agenda can also be the project’s full review—from planning to execution. Then, follow these steps:
Step 1: Schedule the meeting and invite key stakeholders
Ready with the meeting agenda and the participants list?
Great! Now, select a time for the post-mortem meeting soon after the project is completed so that the details are fresh.
Schedule the meeting and share your calendar publicly so everyone is aligned with real-time meeting updates. Create recurring post-mortem meetings and set reminders so you don’t miss any.
With Calendar, you can share your calendar publicly or view your team members’ calendars to find a suitable meeting slot. It also lets you create event reminders so you don’t miss out on post-mortem meetings.
Once you schedule the meeting, send invites to all participants along with the meeting agenda. Meetings can help you manage meeting agendas, set action items, create checklists, and more. Instead of appointing a human meeting assistant, you can easily take notes, document details, and edit and organize the meeting notes using AI.
💡Pro Tip: Got back-to-back post-mortem meetings? Track each one in detail with the Meeting Tracker Template—prepare for the upcoming meeting, track action items, and keep everyone on the same page.
Step 2: Prepare a project timeline and key metrics
After scheduling the meeting, it’s time to prep for the post-mortem.
Create a detailed project timeline and list the essential performance metrics to track. This will provide context for the meeting discussion as participants can access crucial details like project milestones, deadlines, and deliverables quickly.
Define the metrics you want to evaluate. Here are some project metrics you can track:
- Goal achievement: Were all project objectives met?
- Timeliness: Were milestones and deadlines achieved?
- Resource utilization: Were resources allocated effectively?
- Budget adherence: Did the project stay within budget?
To make things easier, use project post-mortem templates. These templates can save you time by helping you set up post-mortem surveys, conduct root cause analysis, review sprints, collect feedback, and manage the entire project post-mortem.
For instance, the Project Post Mortem Template makes gathering feedback from all stakeholders a breeze. It helps you learn from your errors, spot improvement areas, and plan your next project more effectively.
Using this template, you can:
- Analyze project wins, failures, and trends
- Capture key learnings
- Document issues and insights in a structured format
- Monitor progress and improve continuously
For example, the template’s Input Form View helps gather stakeholder feedback. The Pending Task View lets you track pending tasks, and with the Status View, you can track the project’s progress. It also offers custom statuses such as Investigation, New Entry, Resolved, and Unresolved to help you track the status of each task.
Step 3: Gather feedback from the team via surveys or interviews
The next step is to send surveys to all participants and interview them to gather feedback on the project and processes.
🌟 Ask yes-or-no questions to determine if the project plans were followed. For example:
- Did the team stay within budget?
- Did the team meet the due dates?
- Did the team achieve the predefined success metrics?
🌟 Add open-ended questions to the survey or ask them during the interview to gather diverse opinions from team members. For example:
- Did the team get enough time to complete the project?
- What were the main challenges faced during the project, and how did they impact work?
- What aspects of the project went well, and what didn’t?
- Which tasks faced the most delays and why?
- Were communication and collaboration effective across teams?
- What risks emerged during the project, and how were they handled?
🌟 Further, you can include subjective questions to gather responses on team member’s experiences. For example:
- How was your experience working with the team members and the client?
- What did you enjoy the most about the project?
- What was the most challenging aspect of the project?
Such surveys will help you identify common patterns and roadblocks that must be addressed during the meeting.
Create detailed surveys using Forms and capture the data you need. It comes with multiple field types that let you record both quantitative and qualitative data—from long text to contacts and ratings.
Step 4: Facilitate an open and honest discussion
Once you receive the survey responses, you’re all set for the meeting.
On the meeting day, encourage honest conversations without deviating from the meeting agenda. Make sure that the participants share their thoughts without any hesitation.
What to do:
🙌 Create a safe environment, free from criticism, to foster trust among stakeholders and encourage them to share perspectives without hesitation
🙌 Start with what went well to set a positive tone and make the participants feel comfortable to share constructive feedback later
🙌 Employ active listening, respond mindfully, and respect each other’s opinions
🙌 Focus on processes instead of people. For instance, say, ‘We must improve our timeline strategies’ instead of ‘X and Z caused the delays’
🙌 Remind participants that the goal is learning and improving, not criticizing or finger-pointing
🙌 Cover a few important topics in one meeting to avoid overwhelming participants
🙌 Allow sufficient time for each topic of discussion so participants can contribute
You can use Docs to document insights from project post-mortem meetings or write down post-mortem meeting rules. Easily edit the doc with your team members in real time and share it with others.
You can also Assign Comments and action items while ensuring access control.
Chat can facilitate project post-mortem discussions by centralizing all project-related communication. You can review project outcomes and challenges in detail and sync project tasks and documents.
The best part? You get to immediately act on feedback by converting important messages into tasks.
It also lets you create separate channels for each project to avoid confusion and conduct project post-mortem efficiently. This means no switching tabs to review project wins or misses.
Step 5: Analyze the data to identify patterns and lessons learned
Let’s say you’ve surveyed your team and interviewed clients and vendors to learn about their project experience. The next step is to analyze all the responses and meeting discussions to identify recurring issues and successes. To begin, compile relevant data to provide a clear picture of the project.
Systematically analyze the data to identify areas that need your attention. This could include:
- 📊 Metrics: Budget adherence, timelines, resource utilization, and delivery quality
- 📝 Feedback: Surveys or feedback forms from stakeholders, team members, and clients
- 🎯 Milestone review: An overview of key achievements and areas where objectives fell short
For example, if multiple team members, clients, and vendors discussed delays in receiving the latest project updates, it could signal the need for a more robust plan that details communication frequency and channels. This will help avoid communication breakdowns and delays in upcoming projects.
Use customizable Dashboards to visualize data using easy-to-understand pie and bar charts, graphs, progress bars, and more.
With Dashboards, you can:
- Analyze project budgets in real time
- Assess team performance
- Identify root causes of project bottlenecks
- Get actionable insights for informed decision-making
Step 6: Document findings in a comprehensive report
Compile all findings from the analysis and start building a comprehensive report that includes:
⚠️ Challenges: Specific issues faced, their causes, and impact
🏆 Wins: Successful strategies worth replicating
🚧 Risks: Potential hurdles for future projects
📝 Key takeaways: Lessons learned and actionable insights
🚀 Improvements: Clear, practical recommendations for next steps
To save time and effort, use reporting dashboards to lay the findings in an easy-to-understand way. You can easily:
- Visualize data with charts, graphs, and timelines
- Customize views with brand colors and layouts for professionalism
- Track and export time logs for better resource planning
Moreover, you can use after-action report templates to conduct project post-mortem analysis easily and document your findings from the meeting.
✨Fun Fact: The Google Glass project was tested in 2012 and launched a referral campaign to reach a broader audience in 2013. However, its sales stopped by 2015 because Google focused on high-end product features but overlooked communicating its benefits to the audience.
The project post-mortem helped the team understand the importance of clearly presenting the product’s benefits to the target audience and listening to user needs and feedback.
Step 7: Share the report and implement actionable recommendations
Lastly, share the post-mortem report with all the project stakeholders. Conduct a quick meeting to discuss project findings, extract actionable insights, and suggest improvements. Once you’ve planned improvements, delegate tasks to implement the project process changes and track their timelines using ’s Gantt Timeline Template.
Plus, from the next project onwards, you can use project status reports to give key stakeholders an overview of the current project status. This will help you keep everyone informed about the progress and identify and address potential issues proactively.
Project Post-Mortem Mistakes to Avoid
Following the above steps isn’t enough to conduct a successful project post-mortem meeting. You must avoid making these mistakes for a superhit post-mortem 👇
Not conducting the meeting immediately
Timing is everything in project post-mortems. If you don’t organize the meeting as soon as the project ends, participants might forget details, lose interest, or get busy with another project.
✅ Solution: Include the post-mortem meeting in your project plan. Give your team a short break after the deadline, but don’t let weeks slip by. Hold the meeting within a few days after the project ends while the experience remains fresh in the stakeholders’ minds.
Leaving out external stakeholders
Excluding feedback from external stakeholders like clients, vendors, and users will not provide a complete picture of the project’s successes and failures. For example, it’s important to know if an app meets user requirements after software delivery.
✅ Solution: Conduct a 360-degree post-mortem by including external stakeholders. This will give you a broader view of the project’s positives and negatives.
Not setting a clear meeting agenda
Without a clear agenda, post-mortems might go off track. Plus, if the participants aren’t aware of what to expect, they might get discouraged from showing up in the meeting.
✅ Solution: Set and share a meeting agenda to ensure the focus of the meeting is clear. List the talking points to avoid going off-track and set ground rules to avoid negative conversations and blame games.
Avoiding meeting prep
If you aren’t prepared for the meeting with the right documents, it will most probably go downhill. Participants will not have clarity about project details, leading to more conflicts than resolutions.
✅ Solution: Prepare the right documents before the meeting—a post-mortem agenda, questionnaire, and other supporting documents like project budgets, timelines, resource plans, and client feedback. Having these ready will make the meeting more fruitful.
Guarantee Future Wins With Project Post-Mortems
Post-mortems are project recaps to help you reimagine processes, considering feedback from the project stakeholders. The result? A more efficient approach to future projects.
The key is having the right software that helps you conduct a successful post-mortem meeting.
’s project management solution offers a wide array of features to help you organize a post-mortem successfully. You can use the Form View to conduct surveys, Dashboards for reporting, Docs for documenting findings, built-in Chat for clear communication, and tons of templates to track and manage everything—from KPIs and feedback to any aspect of the meeting.
So, why wait? Sign up to for free to explore more features! 🏃➡️
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