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Failures that "could have occurred"? If you've got some anxiety-driven Type A personalities on your team, you're opening up a can of worms....! ;-)
Seriously, though: failures that could have happened but didn't actually count as successes. Be sure to record why and how these failures were prevented. And I like the idea of inviting a project stakeholder (not to mention the snacks...).
-----Original Message-----
From: Hauglie, Joe [mailto:jhauglie -at- ti -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 10:30 AM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: RE: Post-Mortem/Post-Project Review
...
Another recommendation for a post-project review is to do a modified FMEA
(Failure Mode/Effect Analysis). Since an FMEA is usually done before/during
a project, doing it post-facto is not common, but has produced some
interesting results when I've participated in them.
There are basically four columns to this exercise; the first one (Failures)
includes the failures (either those that occurred or could have occurred;
you may consider adding the category of "what we did right" as well); the
second (Mode) is an explanation of WHY it (could have) happened; the third
(Effects) is a statement of the results of the failure (on the positive
angle, this would be a statement regarding what was avoided); and the last
column may be "Actions/Lessons," and offer the team a chance to either
generate a "Let's do this differently next time" statement, or a "This was a
positive decision."
In any case, I'd also recommend that you provide snacks (at least) and most
important, try to get a direct beneficiary of the project (customer?
manager? someone who received a benefit from the success of the project) to
either show up and talk for a few minutes (or a Q&A) or send a short message
to the team regarding his/her appreciation (hopefully) of the team's
efforts.
Hope this helps -
Joe Hauglie
Technical Editor, Texas Instruments - Tucson
jhauglie -at- ti -dot- com
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