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Home > Resources > Latest Research
Project post-mortems tend to get short shrift in the fast-paced business world. Project managers and teams barely catch their breath before moving on to the next goal. But looking back can be invaluable. In studying myriad details of completed projects, the University of Virginia’s IT program is uncovering common causes of failure, and identifying ways to improve tomorrow’s projects.
As he closes in on his 100th project management retrospective, Professor Ryan Nelson can rattle off the top three project management mistakes without stopping to catch his breath: “Lack of estimation and scheduling; ineffective risk management; ineffective stakeholder management,” he says. “All of the 12 classic mistakes involve people and process, not technology or product.”
Nelson is the director of the Master of Science in Management of IT program at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. Since 1999, his students have formed small groups to conduct 99 detailed reviews of completed projects that they have offered up for dissection from their own workplaces. The executive format master’s program is designed for IT management professionals and attracts about 75 students annually. At the end of the program, each of the small groups gives a “postmortem” report on the project it has studied.
Having supervised so many retrospectives as part of the master’s program, Nelson says he “feels like a one-man Standish Group [the IT research organization] but with more depth than they get in their surveys.”
He wrote up a meta-retrospective in the September 2005 issue of the MIS Quarterly Executive that leveraged the knowledge gained from the first 72 project retrospectives.
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