Post Mortems: Do Them Right or Don't Do Them At All

Post Mortems: Do Them Right or Don't Do Them At All Joe Wynne October 12, 2001

Workforce Management

Attending a post mortem is usually as fun as having your teeth drilled without anesthetic. The name itself does not bode well for a meeting that is designed to improve the process used to complete projects. The sad thing is that this is the perfect time to set the stage for a new productive work environment. Instead, all too often an unproductive culture is nurtured.

It's easy to blame an individual as the cause of deviations from desired quality, cost or schedule, even though research has shown that the vast majority of these problems can be eliminated easily by improving the process. Certainly there might be a person at the point where something went wrong, but the sophisticated analysis shows that anyone in the position would have made the same decision--or missed the communication, or failed in the analysis, or created an inadequate design. A key success factor for workforce management is to optimize the processes through which individuals collaborate to add value to the organization.

For example, there are typically points where the interaction process allowed a deviation from optimum workforce performance.