Culture-focused project debriefs

Most attempts to improve project management focus on the wrong thing. Making ProjectPlanTemplate-v7 better than ___v6 is of far less value than improving what actually delivers projects: people.

All we can change is ourselves. And if we choose to change ourselves — how we speak, what we prioritise, how we get things done — then we will do projects better.

Don’t get hung up on the reams of Agile/Prince2/SixSigma or Lean project review methodologies. Actual best practice is done practice, and simple things will consistently get done.

Here’s how.

Groundwork

Get a facilitator. Ideally from outside the project entirely. (Buddy up with a similar organisation and do each other’s debriefs!).

List everyone. Don’t forget the ‘service’ departments; the person who paid every invoice through the finance system will have something to say about the project.

The Facilitator sets the tone in their first communication:

• We’re having a debrief. We will celebrate the awesome, and with the imperfect we shall support everyone to do some personal reflection.
• It is not an autopsy, it is not an audit, it is not an exam. There are no prizes, there are no punishments. There are no winners, there are no losers.
• Everyone’s experience of a project has been personal. Reflections on that are valid; no-one is ‘wrong’ and nothing is ever done perfectly.
• Learning is difficult. It involves recognising one’s own weaknesses and flaws and as such involves vulnerability. There will be some ground rules to create that safe space.

Then set the time, the place and describe the Prep.

Attendees Prep

Everyone makes six notes and brings them along.

• Three notes: what I think and feel went really well
• Three notes: what I think and feel could have gone better

The meeting

Part 1: 5 minutes. Ground Rules.

Facilitator welcomes everyone and restate purpose, then gives everyone the ground rules for the meeting:

• We speak from personal experience: ‘I did…’, ‘I feel…’
• Invalidating anyone else’s experience is not permitted. There will be no ‘you are wrong’, or ‘well, actually’ statements
• We do not use hearsay. No ‘Jeff told told me…’
• We do not justify our views, nor do we ask anyone else to justify their views. There is no ‘Why do you say that?’ there is only ‘…say more…’
• We do not need to close and finish a story. Threads can be left hanging, and ‘I don’t really know’ is a perfectly valid position to land on
• This remains private

Part 2: 10 minutes. Collective storytelling.

Share the story of the project. From the beginnings of the project — ‘my manager asked me to…’ until this meeting, what’s happened? Draw key milestones on a whiteboard. It does not have to be exact. It’s best if it covers emotions. Call out the dark days, the fun times, the annoying decisions, the departure of a valued team member.

Part 3: 5 minutes. Individual story sharing

Everyone puts their notes up onto the wall — no conversation. Went really well on one side and could have gone better on the other.

Part 4: 15 minutes. Applause

Read the went really well notes together. Celebrate what went well (encourage applause!) There may be reflections— something that went well for one person might give a clue to someone else’s development — but this isn’t the moment to stop celebrating. Build positivity in the room: we were fabulous!

Part 5: 45 minutes. What could’ve been better

Choose one of the could have gone better notes and talk about it. Share any personal views on that note. The goal is to develop insights for the future, not to resolve the issue. Choose another and repeat. You don’t have to do them all. Themes will arise.

Some people will become very self-critical. The group can help them see they’re being hard on themselves. Some people might think they have nothing to learn. Ignore them and minimise their input — this isn’t for them, and the group should focus on those who will get value from it.

The group must not allow one or two people (often, the more senior people) to dominate discussions. ‘Pair and share’ can help to reduce this tendency.

Pick an opportune moment to take a 5-minute natural break. That opportune moment can often help move the group on from a sticky issue.

Part 6: 5 minutes. Personal reflection

Everyone takes a moment to reflect on what they’ve said and heard, making some personal notes of personal takeaways of their success and their lessons.

It is nice for people to share their personal biggest personal takeaway, if they want to, but not essential. It will depend on the feeling in the room.

Part 7: 5 minutes. Takeaways, anonymising and close

Decide as a group what the biggest takeaways are for the organisation. Useful prompts for this are:

• What do we want the CEO to know about this project?
• What would we ask the next project team to bear in mind?

The facilitator writes these down, then scrubs the board of personal identifying information and closes the meeting.

After the meeting

Everyone should spend a few minutes in the next 24 hours making some notes for themselves. Over time these will build into a portfolio of insights for personal development

The facilitator should circulate the takeaways around the whole group. After confirmation from attendees that they are sufficiently generalised and anonymised, they should be circulated upwards.

Keep it to one page: if it isn’t, it won’t be read and if it isn’t read it’s useless.

Tips for advanced players

• Pre-plan for senior people to share their reflections on their own mis-steps first. It will encourage the rest. It also helps if the senior staff arrive without notebooks. People can fear they’re being graded and assessed, so minimise the chance that it looks this way
• Discussions can get stuck on single issues, such as tech hurdles, or governance missteps. Facilitate these away by throwing in prompts on classic project management issues. Risks, Budget, Scope, Decisions, Procurement, Purpose…
• Involve your external teams, if you have them. Getting in your architect, marketing agency (or whoever) to review a project with you can be very revealing!
• Build a library of the one-page outputs, and use it to assess recurrent issues in the organisation; for example, if ‘decision-making’ comes up in four out of five debrief meetings, perhaps it’s something the whole org needs to get better at?
• Build the library of debriefs into your project planning. You can require the project manager to workshop with the team ‘what are we going to do so that [this] doesn’t come up in our project?’ It’s also a useful start point for a pre-mortem.
• Do this with operational teams, or departments — for this, focus on a period of time, not project

Final notes

It’s easy for project teams to drift apart at the end of the project, and just pitch into the next one. That’s a huge missed opportunity for personal and organisational learning. Make sure it happenss

Project debriefing is often the responsibility of project managers and Program Management Offices (PMOs). It would assist organisations if instead these were the responsibility of the People and Culture team.