Completing a project" is not the same thing as ending the project management process. Simply finishing doesn't ensure that our church benefits from the project's outcome.
For example, after completing a year long project to establish a new quality management process for your church, you want to make sure that what you set out to do was actually achieved. Your objective wasn't to simply deliver a process – but rather, to deliver the process that addresses the specific spiritual need you intended to meet. This is the real measure of success.
To make the most of the benefits that the project can deliver, however, you also need to check to see if further improvements will deliver still greater benefit.
You also need to ensure that the lessons learned during the project are not forgotten. You can more effectively design and execute future projects when you take advantage of lessons learned through experience of previous projects.
So how can you properly measure a project's success, and work toward continuous improvement? This is where the process of Post-Implementation Review (PIR) is helpful. It helps you answer the following key questions:
* Did the project fully solve the problem that it was designed to address?
* Can we take things further, and deliver even bigger benefits?
* What lessons did we learn that we can apply to future projects?
Here are some tips for conducting the PIR:
Ask for openness – Emphasize the importance of being open and honest in your assessment, and make sure that people aren't in any way punished for being open.
Be objective – Describe what has happened in objective terms, and then focus on improvements.
Document success – Document practices and procedures that led to project successes, and make recommendations for applying them to similar future projects.
Look with hindsight – Pay attention to the "unknowns" (now known!) that may have increased implementation risks. Develop a way of looking out for these in future projects.
Be future-focused – Remember, the purpose is to focus on the future, not to assign blame for what happened in the past. This is not the time to focus on any one person or team.
Look at both positives and negatives – Identify positive as well as negative lessons.
When conducting the review, include the following activities:
Conduct a gap analysis.
Determine whether the project goals were achieved.
Are users adequately trained and supported? And are there sufficiently enough confident, skilled people in place?
Are the necessary controls and systems in place, and are they working properly?
Determine the project's costs and benefits.
What were the final costs?
How do the costs compare with the benefits achieved?
Identify areas of further development.
Could you make further changes, which would deliver even more value?
Identify lessons learned.
What went wrong, why did these things go wrong, and how could these problems be avoided next time?
Please respond with your experiences and processes of post project review.
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