Project Debrief - [Prepare your Meeting in 4 Easy Steps]
After finishing every project, your organization should perform a Project Debrief. This is one of the most important meetings you can carry out within your company since it provides crucial information for future initiatives and helps to improve relationships between colleagues.
What Is a Project Debrief?
A project Debrief, AKA after action review or project post-mortem, is a process where you and your team analyze a recently completed project. This analysis aims to evaluate which aspects went well and which did not in order to find ways to improve the weak points and avoid repeating them in future projects.
Basically, you build project debriefs asking and answering three questions:
What were we trying to achieve?
What happened, and how this affected the results?
What can we learn from this experience?
Why Is a Project Debrief Relevant to Your Organization?
When you and your team perform project debrief meetings, reflect on the why of a successful project and the main impediments, challenges, and weak points.
When a project manager and their team run a project debrief correctly, they and all the other project stakeholders can learn what to do and what not to do in subsequent projects.
In short, when you carry on a successful project debrief, you learn what you did well and what you did wrong in a particular project.
Conducting a Proper Project Debrief in 4 Steps
You can carry out a project debrief in four simple steps. However, although it looks like a simple process, you should pay special attention to each involved step.
1. Make the Time
We know you and your team are busy. Besides, every process within your company constantly changes, and objectives fluctuate. Moreover, in the middle of this maelstrom, you need to find the time to perform a project debrief since it is a crucial stage with multiple benefits. So, make the time and invite the whole team to participate.
2. Ask the Right Questions
Asking the right questions will pave the way to appropriate conclusions. For this reason, asking the right questions is crucial to get a proper project retrospective and learning the correct lessons. Some questions you should ask every team member and the whole group are the following:
- What was the final goal of this project?
When you and your whole team started with the project, you all probably knew the project's main goal. But it's also very likely that, over the course of the production, you diverted your way or changed the course of events, and the final goal changed eventually.
Due to this, it's relevant to reiterate your project's goals when beginning with the debrief meeting. This way, you'll remind all the attendees what the project objective was and be able to see in perspective all the factors that helped (or not) achieve it.
- What happened?
When you and your team members discuss project's outcomes, you must address both good and bad factors. So, you should ask open-ended questions that bring ideas and give you a glance at the results.
- Did we provide the best product we could?
- If we did, does the client agree with this opinion?
- Did our new project management methodology make things better or worse?
You can also ask other closed questions that can provide more detailed information. Some productive questions in this sense are the following:
- Did we accomplish the completion of the project timely?
When you run a series of direct questions to your team members, it's natural that they close up since they don't want to reflect on what they did wrong. It's a common position, but they also are open to capturing lessons learned. So, it's your mission to encourage them to be brave and speak honorably.
- What can we learn from this experience?
Now that you and your team have a correct approach to what happened, you should discuss what you learned from the previous questions and the production experience. In this sense, you should take meeting notes to register all the lessons any staff member learned. Some related questions you can do are the following:
- What did we do right, and what was wrong?
- What was successful and not so successful?
- What could have been prevented? (for future reference)
It's also important to ask how your team and organization can grow after this experience. In your meeting agenda, you should consider asking the following questions:
- How will your team take what you've just learned and do better next time?
- Do these improvements work for one project or apply to most projects?
- Are these important insights crucial when implementing a new process or procedure?
- Are you capable of committing to a more realistic timeline and deadlines?
- What changes would you make to move forward in future projects?
The latter question is crucial to achieving success in subsequent projects since it will indicate a new approach for future initiatives.
3. Perform a Participant Survey
This point is not mandatory, but you should consider it to perform a more immersive and deep project debrief and not just touch the project wraps. So, sending surveys to the participants or external project attendees will provide good feedback and a different perspective on the experience. Some questions you can include to get interesting survey responses are the following:
Did you enjoy some aspects of the experience?
What key takeaways can you improve to deliver a good project to the clients?
Can you innovate new approaches to problems and hit difficult objectives?
Would you recommend the project to friends or other clients?
After getting the results of the survey, you should include all the responses at the bottom of the brief document.
Members should synthesize the most critical insights from your successes, especially from things that didn't go well. You can use the "5-why" or the "Peel the Onion" method to identify the root cause of the problem.
4. Optimize Your Approach
With the valuable information you got in the previous sections, you should update the campaign playbook (if you already have one) with general insights to create new action items and procedures for future projects. For example, you can include the following insights in the playbook:
- “We should have different food options.”
- “We should include all departments when we perform a project debrief meeting.”
- “When we talk about goals with clients, you should provide a product with a strong framework.”
These insights will help you optimize your approach or even provide a new one for future projects.
So, it’s time to apply what you learned!
A project debrief only makes sense if you prepare an improved approach for future processes.
So it's time to assign action items you created thanks to the previous process to provide a new approach. In the discussion you'll carry on, you should ask your team the following:
- Is there a way through which you and your team can differently deliver a better product?
- Did you discover a way to produce better results with less effort?
You should do the opposite and conduct a slower creative and production process to ensure your organization delivers a high-quality standard product.
Whatever conclusions your team extracts from the process, make sure that everyone who participates in the production understands the new approach and how to move forward in this direction.
In this regard, all the people involved in the process will have better chances of achieving new goals if they receive essential takeaways.
Project Debrief Tips
A couple of tips never hurt. These will help you to develop and perform the debriefing meeting even in a better way.
Set Real Expectations
In a previous conversation with your team, you should make it clear that the debrief will be a standard policy after any time the team completes a project. This way, when you invite participants, they will be ready and make time in their schedule and calendar to attend the meeting.
Elect a Meeting Moderator
A good practice when you carry on a project debrief is electing a moderator. This person will be in charge of the meeting. This moderator could be yourself or a highly responsible person within your company.
Project Debrief Templates
Below are templates to share and communicate any insight you extract from project debrief meetings. These are also useful for determining goals and strong and weak points and drawing conclusions.
To edit the templates, you’ll need Microsoft Office software. If you don’t have an activation key, RoyalCDKeys offers several versions of the Microsoft Office suite to use the templates above or even build your own.
For example, you can find a reliable Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global copy at €8,99. This edition contains all the most useful Office applications, such as Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Get your version and the lowest price on the market, and start to create and discuss your project debrief!
Project Debrief Template
This template is perfect for post-project assessment and enables the manager and sponsor to finally close the project. This document is vital to improve participant communication and evaluate original objectives, goals, project challenges, tasks, etc. From a certain point of view, this file is a facilitator to know what your team did well and what it did wrong and implement it in future projects.
You can download this project debrief template from Smartsheet.
Event Debrief and Evaluation Template
This is a short debrief describing event experiences and how the participants felt during the process. It brings detailed and essential information about prosperous and not successful points. It also incorporates boxes for surveyors to describe vital elements they need to do differently and what actions are recommended to improve critical performance. Finally, in the last part of the document, you can also provide suggestions to face future and challenging projects.
You can download this event debrief and evaluation template from Dexform.
Construction Project Debrief Template
This template is designed to contain very important information about the results of a specific construction project. Thanks to this document, you focus on evaluating the building process with team members or stakeholders to determine if you achieved the expected goals. It integrates several sections to describe every step of the project, challenges and opportunities, and what you’ll do better to improve the process in future projects. It also has a vast space for comments and notes to inform everything you need.
You can download this construction project debrief template from Smartsheet.
Conclusion
We've arrived at the bottom line of this article, reader. We hope we have given you all the tools you need for debriefing at the end of a project. The document's importance is overpowering, so take it seriously and perform an excellent session using the information we've shared. Be prepared, communicate with your colleagues, discover failures, and boost what you all did well! Soon you'll see a fantastic improvement within your company.
For other interesting articles that can blow everyone’s minds, browse our blog. You can even download other valuable templates to keep your employees and managers encouraged, organized, and interested in the success of your business.