Project Postmortem Best Practices that Matter Most

Project Postmortem Best Practices: Why Every Organization Needs a Formal Project Postmortem Process
In the high-stakes world of strategy execution, we know from organizational culture assessments that too many leaders celebrate successes and quietly move past failures.  But lessons do not naturally embed themselves into future projects or cultural ways of working. Without a formal project postmortem process, organizations risk:

• Repeating mistakes.
• Misallocating resources.
• Eroding team morale.
• Tolerating a low performance culture.

A structured project postmortem creates the cultural discipline to extract actionable insights to learn and improve performance.

The Top 4 Project Postmortem Best Practices

1. Formally Turn Experience into Organizational Knowledge
   Every project sends ripples. Each success and failure generates information about leaders, strategies, budgets,  timelines, stakeholders, and team dynamics. A formal project postmortem ensures key strategy, culture, and talent insights are not lost. According to research by the Project Management Institute (PMI), organizations that systematically conduct post-project reviews are 33% more likely to complete future projects on time and within budget.

   A formal postmortem also creates an important team norm: sharing knowledge between projects and across teams. Future projects and teams should benefit from prior experiences. This project postmortem best practice can be the difference between a culture of reactive problem-solving and proactive learning.

2. Foster a Culture of Accountability and Continuous Improvement
   Done right, project retrospectives drive measurable behavioral and cultural benefits. When facilitated in a psychologically safe team environment, postmortems encourage a healthy and open debate about what truly went right, what could be improved, and where company-wide patterns of strategic ambiguity, cultural misalignment, and capability gaps must be addressed. By integrating project postmortem best practices into how work gets done, leaders signal learning and improvement is more important than optics and blame.
3. Explicitly Align Stakeholders and Improve Future Planning
   Projects and project teams rarely exist in isolation. Shared goals across functions require shared assumptions, incentives, and information. The more complex and high stakes the project, the more structure is needed to respectfully uncover issues and align diverse stakeholder groups on improvements needed.

   The objective is to capture unfiltered insights that improve planning, risk management, team engagement, strategic decision-making, forecasting, communication, resource allocation, and contingency planning.  Over time, this project postmortem best practice helps project schedules and outcomes to become more predictable thereby strengthening organizational trust in in both project leaders and project management processes.

4. Implement a Formal Postmortem Process
   When left up to teams, the postmortem process is inconsistent at best. High performing project management organizations (PMOs) establish clear expectations, objectives, approaches, timing, and outcomes for every key project. They also ensure that all key stakeholders from project sponsors to team members are actively involved in the process from the beginning.

The Bottom Line
Done right, postmortems build the organizational intelligence, accountability, and continuous improvement required to systemically improve project success rates and raise team engagement levels. Have you embedded project postmortem best practices into your culture?

To learn more about project postmortem best practices, download 5 Steps to Align Project Teams to Pull in the Same Direction

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.