How to Conduct Constructive Project Post-Mortems

Important factors include openness, thoughtfulness and a dose of humor.
Written by Remy Merritt
September 9, 2021Updated: September 10, 2021

Despite movie depictions of tough bosses and insufferable coworkers, there is no place in the professional world for finger-pointing and blame games. Singling out individuals for their accomplishments and impressive work can build morale; however, when it comes to mistakes and issues during a project post-mortem, very little progress is made by making examples of specific team members.

When designing a project post-mortem meeting, Erik Jurt, director of software delivery at BenchPrep, stands behind a wide-lens approach that avoids singling out participants.

“Focusing on individual team members, whether it’s a success or a failure, can detract from the purpose of a blameless post-mortem,” he said.

That purpose? Learning, acting and improving on strategy, and becoming better equipped for future projects. Instead, kicking off a post-mortem “a reminder of our overall successes and results can help emphasize that despite inevitable issues, we overcome them as a team.” 

 

Erik Jurt
Director of Software Delivery • BenchPrep

What are the first steps teams can take to create a blameless post-mortem process?

There are several important factors to a blameless meeting: openness, thoughtfulness and a dose of humor. In especially tense post-mortems due to particularly troubling processes or issues along the way, it is important to keep things light at times while also focused. 

Set an agenda prior to the start of the meeting in order to focus people’s minds on the targeted areas you are looking to unpack. Starting a meeting with general conversation sets people at ease and serves as a reminder of overall successes. Once you start digging in, focus is important to keep people looking toward issues they were directly involved in. When items start including others, if negative connotation is implied, we try to steer the contributor back toward the objective. Keep people in their lanes as best you can and try to alleviate tension by reminding the group of the goal of the post-mortem — learning, acting and improving — and not dwelling too long on any given point.

A blame game has no winners — only losers.”

Why is it important to focus on incidents and accidents rather than individual team members when going through a blameless post-mortem?

Focusing on individual team members, whether it’s a success or a failure, can detract from the purpose of a blameless post-mortem. It can be good to highlight individual contributions or successes, such as finding a solution to an engineering problem; however, paying too much mind to it can detract from others’ feelings of their own success. Singling out individuals can even make others consider their actions a failure by comparison, particularly if they find themselves as the source of issues during the project. For that same reason, focusing on the people who contributed to issues versus the issues themselves is sure to put the person into a place of defense instead of learning.

A blame game has no winners — only losers. Additionally, when you focus on individual team members, you can lose sight of incidents or accidents that may have had no direct contributor. Perhaps an issue arose that was no one’s fault. When you focus on specific people, it tends to have a more lasting impression and may not be valuable to other realized issues.

 

How has the blameless post-mortem process enhanced your project development and execution?

By focusing on real problems that aren’t specific to individuals, more people generally pay attention to them or accept new working agreements as a result that can help staff at large improve their efficiency. It allows people to hone in on issues that could happen to anyone, even with innocent mistakes. And the people who find themselves at fault while reflecting on them are usually more approachable and appreciative of the opportunities to adjust and correct their own behavior. 

When you focus on incidents and issues at the heart rather than the people, it also continues to nurture a growing camaraderie where you don’t have to worry as much about potential internal conflicts amongst individuals. Teams tend to feel more ownership over action items that result from a blameless post-mortem, and corrective action is easier to identify and facilitate.

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