Servage Magazine

It is true that today we have a queue of the next web development projects ahead of us once we finish one. There is a stiffly competitive era for our next generations and us. Therefore, if someone reads the title and catches the word postmortem some knee jerk reactions are expected, particularly for a freelancer and same for a big organization or web or mobile development company.

Freelancers might suffer from stress and some negligence, as they have no apparent reasons to find out pit holes and blame someone else. Whereas giant companies avoid witch-hunts and blame game over project postmortem if success rate is low or moderate. Despite all this, I would like to suggest you to run some sort of postmortem on each project completion despite such obstacles, as we all don’t want to repeat our mistakes and want to improve our performance in order to sustain in competitions where competitors are smart players.

Let’s think over the effective and cost-saving methods of the project postmortem from a recent post.

Taking Pen & Paper

If you are a lonely one as a worker in a project as in the case of freelancer you have a better chance to do some brainstorming over the project life cycle phased off recently and  the final payment is coming within days. You can make a comparative table or produce brief documents citing important outcome as well as inferences from the past project.

• Generally you need to  point out what has gone wrong during the project first
• Afterwards you need to pamper your back for the good things you have done during recent project
• The next possible step is to make a document over the project completions and store all the important stuff you have generated during the project whether it was being used or not. This way you can collect valuable assets for coming projects
• Update your portfolio citing this project and describe good things you have done during the life-cycle of the mentioned project so it becomes good advertisement for you. Same way, you can add the client’s testimonials if available and get good backing through such approval gestures.
• Finally, chart out a calendar for the analytic observations  of the website so you can measure your success as well as keep in touch with that client by suggesting one or two useful things inferred from the analytics software

Using Whiteboard and Meeting

Yes, this process is mandatory for the small to big web development or software development companies working in different domains. I advocate whiteboard for the small companies and meeting hall for the giants. Apart from the above described procedure, we have to take extra care for the postmortem meetings as there are greater chances to go off-track in the postmortem discussions or play the blame games or witch hunts by various people or groups in and outside the company.

Let’s see what we can do for such postmortem meetings to make them successful and satisfactory results generating ones.

• Prepare Meeting Agenda: – yes, we should have some defined agenda of the meeting so we can discuss good and bad aspects of the project in some balanced way and bring fruitful results for newcomers as well as seasoned developers and web designers.
• Ensure Maximum participation: – if you are not arranging the participation of all stakeholders who have taken part in the project, you might not have adequate ideas what has gone right and wrong in their expertise. Thus, assure maximum participation first.
• Assign Neutral Moderator/s: – this step is important because project manager is one of the key stakeholders of the project so we can’t expect his/her neutral role as a moderator to take unbiased notes and run meeting in right directions.

References & More Reading

Project post-mortems: how to successfully conclude any project

Running Effective Post-Mortem Meetings