post-mortems are an essential part of the project management process, ensuring teams learn from mistakes and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. However, if these analyses aren’t conducted in a structured and purposeful way, they can quickly get off track and result in meaningless action items.
post-mortem templates are crucial documents for project managers, providing a framework to conduct post-event meetings and ensure consistency across all projects and teams.
This article will share several great template examples and introduce ways to apply a more structured approach to post-mortem meetings. We’ll even throw in a free post-mortem template on monday.com and share how our Work OS can transform project planning and reflection initiatives.
A post-mortem is an investigation into and reflection on project successes and challenges.
It’s usually conducted at the completion (post) of a project. However, there are times when it’s used directly after an incident … which may be mid-project.
post-mortems are generally run as meetings. This allows the entire project team to be present, ask questions, provide feedback, etc. However, the findings of that meeting must be recorded and documented for future use.
Enter: The post-mortem template.
post-mortems can also be used to reflect on workplace incidents.
Aside from the fields for details such as the date of the review meeting and the employees involved, this template asks four key questions:
After completing that reflection process, action items are added at the bottom of the post-mortem template and assigned to individual owners.
Some project managers find it helpful to preempt the post-mortem meeting by surveying the project team. This allows the PM to kick off the meeting with a few insights that have already been provided by the team, avoiding that awkward first few minutes before the conversation starts rolling.
This post-mortem survey template is quite efficient. It includes a few questions that team members can answer by checking a box on a scale of one to five and then provides the opportunity for slightly longer-form answers for questions such as “What issues would you like to discuss in the meeting?”
One of the problems with most post-mortem templates is that they’re disconnected, static documents that don’t link with the tools you’re already using to manage projects. In addition, most of them are designed to be printed out and written on.
The monday.com Work OS includes an interactive, collaborative post-mortem template.
The monday.com Work OS is a collaborative online workspace that allows teams to build custom, user-friendly apps built around how they work. Teams can visualize work in multiple ways — Gantt, Kanban, tables, etc. — and communicate and collaborate “on the go” using purpose-built mobile apps.
The post-mortem template is built on monday.com workdocs, the collaborative online word editor within the monday.com Work OS.
Workdocs takes things a few steps further from the basic online word editors, providing bug-free real-time collaboration and allowing users to connect and display data from their various monday.com work management boards.
After finishing the project post-mortem using this template, it’s simple to pull information from the project management board. post-mortem analysis done? Action items built? Plug ‘em straight into the task management board and get to work!
A few best practices for post-mortem templates:
Here’s where the template comes in. Share the structure before the meeting so everyone is prepared for the upcoming discussion.
The project must be fresh in the minds of everyone involved when conducting the post-mortem. Therefore, try to run the meeting immediately after the project before moving on to another (similar) project.
A brief survey questionnaire can help get the conversation started. Start the discussion by reviewing and summarizing survey results. This also provides the “less vocal” team members the opportunity to voice their views.
At the beginning of the post-mortem meeting, set expectations by explaining the purpose of the meeting and what the end goals are. Remind everyone that while the goal is to uncover areas for improvement, the meeting should be organized and structured with only constructive feedback.
The last part of any solid post-mortem meeting should involve analyzing the various insights discovered and turning them into action items. Ask, “What can we do about this?” “How can we make this better NEXT time?
Those action items will fuel continuous improvement.
post-mortems should be structured to include the following information:
post-mortems should be conducted after any severe incident — SEV1 or SEV2 — including any time an incident response is triggered, even if the incident severity was later lower. SEV1 is a production outage or system failure. SEV2 is an incident of a higher severity — a major incident with a significant impact.
