Planning Tool
Use this planning tool to track information you need to know as you as you design your plan for your project review.
Background Information
- What, if any, review work has already been done?
- Who is the customer or customers of the project review? Management? The project manager? The team,
What is the problem we are trying to solve?
- Is there a specific issue or problem that you want to be sure and solve?
What would success look like?
- When the postmortem is complete, how will you evaluate its success? What would change? What would stay the same?
Whatever your answer, this should be the goal that drives your postmortem.
Scope the Problem
- What kind of a project or event was it?
- How long did the project last
- How many people and organizations were affected?
- How did it go? Were there significant problems or successes?
- Did we do better or worse than our last project like this?
- Do the team members have a common view or perception of events that occurred or are their viewpoints different?
- Where do we REALLY need to improve: schedule predictability, quality, estimation of resource needs, development processes or practices?
- What kinds of things impacted schedule, resources, or quality
- How long has it been since the product shipped
More difficult problems will indicate more effort in discovering the root causes and solutions to your problems
What is the investment the team would like to make?
- How much time do you think the team will want to spend on the postmortem effort? What about the leadership team? the project manager? the postmortem coordinator?