Project Management with the IBM® Rational Unified Process®: Lessons from the Trenches

Chapter 15. The Project Postmortem

For an organization to improve its ability to develop software, it should take the time to reflect on a project’s successes and failures. Even failed projects have some successes, and projects considered successful often have some failures. The purpose of a project postmortem is to collect the lessons learned, instill them in the organization’s memory, and apply them to the next set of projects. This chapter discusses the best practices for this process.

Defining the Project Postmortem

A project postmortem is the process of reviewing the project’s history to understand how each event contributed to the success or resulted in challenges for the project’s outcome. In other words, it is the process of ascertaining ...