Project Management A) Lessons Learned

Project Management

a) Lessons learned sessions or conducting project-post mortems are essential for the success of future projects, because of two primary reasons: on one hand, they can allow the developing team to identify what went well with a project, and thus retain these elements for future phases of development or for other projects. At the same time, these help in determining what did not go well with a project, and creating the basis to correct this in the future (Hackett, 2007).

At the same time, the project post mortems are important because they create a "calm period of reflection" (Wolf, 2010) after the project is completed, something that the team has not benefited from during the developing phases of the project. This reflexive period is essential to creating the set of lessons learned that can be used in the future.

Finally, the post-mortem is also important from a financial point-of-view (Pastore, 2003). In some large organizations, this is a full audit of the way money was spent during the developing phases. At the same time, any organization or even smaller team should use the project-post mortem to analyze how efficiently the money was spent and how this efficiency can be improved in the future. Ideally, this can be extended to the productivity of the workforce as well or to ways that the expenses can be trimmed down.