• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Conducting a Post Implementation Review

Question 18: Have you conducted a post-implementation review?

Good Practice: It is best practice to go back and review the progress made in delivering the project deliverables and overall business benefits. Time the post-implementation review to allow you to make final improvements to get the best benefits from the project.

Organisations are beginning to recognise the growing importance of knowledge management as a key to competitive advantage. We must therefore become better at capturing our learning and making this information available to the rest of the organisation. This task will increasingly become the duty of every manager.

As the project manager, you are in a position to help your customer gain the benefits detailed in the business case. It can be a different phase once you have closed the project or run as a part of the overall project. It may not follow on directly from the project end and start after a short time, but before the post-implementation review, which typically takes place three to six months after the project has been completed.

Opinion seems divided as-to-whether active benefits realisation is the project manager's domain. Still, one thing is sure; many projects declared successful never deliver the planned benefit or result.

Hold a formal debrief session at the end of your projects, including a post-implementation lesson-learned review with your team.

Common Mistakes

• Forgetting what has been done and discarding any valuable experience gained on a challenging project.
• Being so relieved to finish that we moved on without reviewing the project's result.
• Disbanding the project team too fast before capturing the learnings.