The Myth of the Post Project Review

Abstract

The ‘post project review’ is an established feature of a typical approach to the project life cycle. It imagines that flush with a fresh experience of project completion, the project team would be primed to reflect and capture that learning, serving their own development and crucially that of future and ongoing projects in the organisation or programme. No project management writers could be found that contest this notion. However, writers on organisational learning see that continuous learning in organisations is difficult, if desirable and hard to attain. This study sought to examine the post project review through the lens of learning theory, which predicts a difficulty for the post project review in learning transfer. A set of interviews using a sample of experienced project managers, with a minimum of 20 years working on projects, inducted some themes that supported learning theory. It highlighted lost opportunities as being a feature of projects that had undertook formalised and facilitated post project reviews. Post project learning seems limited to the immediate team, with critical lessons for other organisational projects and organisational performance, being actively dismissed or suppressed by organisational interests. Recommendations are made for future practice to better capture the benefits that are left latent in post project learning; these are that further work is undertaken to identify ways for the soft skills paradigm to assist the enhancement of the learning and planning for, predictable risks, and the exploitation of opportunities, at pre-project, mid-project and post project, thus improving the management of issues known to arise on projects.