Positive Postmortems
It’s hard to get excited about a project gone wrong. Which can make it easy to want to just move forward without looking back. Projects that fail or have major issues can have huge value, if learned from. I should say that when I say fail, it doesn’t always mean that it ended in failure, but it could mean that it was late, more expensive, not as valuable etc.
Before proceeding, I should share my bias – I don’t think the best way to learn is through failure. Mentorship, modeling, figuring out things that work all rank higher on my list for ways to learn most effectively. One reason is that when you are at your best, you simply think more clearly. Another reason is that the learning doesn’t just magically happen. In my experience this failure based learning happens when you are able to look back at the situation, understand what really happened, and can think through what lessons can be taken forward.
With that said, I find postmortems to be an excellent way to identify issues in systems. I’ve seen many teams with various projects and a few seem to go wildly off track. In most cases at first inquiry people talk about the special cases that this project is under. The reality is that most of the time the failing project isn’t hitting issues the others aren’t it’s that it’s hitting them all at once. These perfect storm projects are some of the best ways to identify the inefficient breaks in the systems that other projects hit, but not hard enough to fail.
Accusatory rehashing of the past makes people defensive, less likely to be honest, and really, knowing who gets what share of the blame a useless learning device. In the rare case that it really is one person or malicious, there are other approaches than postmortems. The best way to get a clear idea of what’s really going on and the best thinking around what changes would help all project going forward is by creating a positive space. Here are 7 simple tips for creating positive postmortems:
- Set clear expectations up front. Let people know that it is about identifying issues in the system, not finding blame. You may need to reassure people of this multiple times.
- Assume everyone had the best intentions and treat them that way. No one wanted the project to fail.
- Look for patterns and root causes. For example, if risk and extra work took too long to get raised, think about what is in place to help raise those issues rather than so-and-so didn’t scream loud enough.
- Maintain forward focus. We can’t go back and change things, so there isn’t any point in making people feel like they should.
- Have someone facilitate who was not involved in the project. Otherwise if the facilitator is a participant they may not have the space to properly facilitate or they may inadvertently bias the conversations. A third party can focus on keeping the space productive.
- With the exception of the facilitator limit attendance to those folks who were actively involved in the projects. Others can learn from the notes.
- Depersonalize the situation. It could be anyone in any of the roles involved. Frame questions so that people are encouraged to recount what their experience was and what happened. They may add in some of the personalization and specifics about who did what. That’s okay as long as it’s just about laying what they observed. As the facilitator it is best to help extract out those portions and then ask if that’s an accurate abstraction.
I hope these tips help you keep your postmortems positive, getting the most out of them. Are you finding challenges you’d like help with? Or do you have some great tips yourself? I’d love to hear your thoughts on how these tips help you and your experience with postmortems in general.
