Post-Project Reviews in R&D

Post-project reviews—sometimes called post-mortems—are opportunities to improve performance in subsequent R&D projects. However, most companies have not established a structured approach to learning from projects after their completion. Even worse, most projects that have been prematurely terminated never undergo a retrospective analysis of what caused them to fail. A recent survey indicated that 80 percent of all R&D projects were not reviewed at all after completion, and most of the remaining 20 percent were reviewed without established review guidelines. Companies that neglect post-project reviews as a tool for systematic inter-project learning throw away invaluable potential for competence building. A five-level postproject process model is presented that helps to build such a learning organization in R&D.