Project Postmortems
Thomas J. Kennedy
The most important part of any exercise is not the grade–although the grade is an (i.e., one) important detail. The most important parts of any exercise (graded or ungraded) are the:
- new insight gained
- new perspectives observed
- lessons learned (especially when lessons are learned from mistakes).
In Software Engineering a post project meeting is used to perform this analysis. In looking for an elegant definition, I came across a Blog titled Coding Horror. The quote reads as:
The difference between average programmers and excellent developers is not a matter of knowing the latest language or buzzword-laden technique. Rather, it can boil down to something as simple as not making the same mistakes over and over again. Fortunately, there’s a powerful tool that any developer can use to help learn from the past: the project postmortem.
Retrieved from The Project Postmortem.
Completeing a project is is an accomplishment, and not a small one. However, it is not the most important part. No matter how well you did on an project, if you can not explain what you did, what you did wrong, and what you would do differently… you are not done.