Conducting a Post Implementation Review
Question 18: Have you conducted a post implementation review?
Good Practice: It is good practice to go back and review the progress made in delivering each of the project deliverables and overall business benefits. Organisations are beginning to recognise the growing importance of knowledge management as a key to competitive advantage. We must therefore become much better at capturing our learning and making this information available to the rest of the organisation. This will increasingly become the duty of every manager.
As project manager, you are in a unique position to help your customer gain the benefits, detailed in the business case. It can be an additional phase once you have closed the project or run as part of the project itself. It may not follow on directly from the project end and start after a short period of time, but before the post implementation review, which typically takes place 3-6 months after the project has been completed.
Opinion seems divided as to whether active benefits realisation is the domain of the Project Manager, but one thing is certain - many projects declared a success never deliver the desired benefit or outcome.
At the conclusion of your projects hold formal debrief sessions including a post implementation "Lessons Learned" review with the team.
Common Mistakes
- Forgetting what has been done and discarding any useful experience that has been gained on a difficult project.
- Being so relieved to finish that we simply move on without reviewing the project's result.
- Disbanding the team too fast before the learning has been captured.
