Congrats! Your team just completed a big project. Why not take a moment to celebrate this milestone?

Post-mortem meetings – also known as project retrospectives – are the perfect tool for project managers and team leads to uncover insights, celebrate wins, and find ways to improve internal processes.

According to Simon Heaton – Growth Lead at Shopify, you should always try to answer the following questions when running your own post-mortem:

• What went right during the project that we can repeat in the future?
• What went wrong during the project that we should avoid in the future?
• What should we do differently next time?

Simon also advices that, just like any other meeting, you should prepare an agenda for your post-mortem to ensure your discussion doesn’t get sidetracked. In order to help your team run successful and efficient meetings, we’re sharing Simon Heaton’s meeting agenda!

What’s inside this Post-Mortem Meeting agenda template

1 Reminder to fill out the post-mortem questionnaire

Before sending your agenda to the meeting attendees, Simon recommends sending a pre-meeting questionnaire:

“This helps ensure that everyone comes to the meeting prepared with key takeaways from the project, and the majority of your meeting can be spent discussing those points, rather than trying to identify of them.”

Some questions you can ask in the questionnaire include:

• Were the goals of the project clear?
• Were communications handled in an efficient and effective manner?
• Were updates/changes transparent to all stakeholders?
• What unexpected obstacles arose that affected the ability to meet milestones?
• What additional information would have facilitated the project workflow?

2 Recap of the project

In this part of the meeting, the group can discuss the initial expectations and deliverables for the project. This sets a good foundation and background for the next part of the meeting.

3 Recap of the outcome

This section of the post-mortem meeting will focus on identifying and discussing:

• What went well
• What went differently from the anticipated workflow

One pro tip that Simon shares is to celebrate your team’s wins and positive input:

“Take this time to acknowledge what expectations, objectives, and deadlines were met, while also pinpointing any organizational processes or workflows that went particularly smooth on your end or your client’s.”

On the other hand, make sure that your team isn’t playing the “blame game” when discussing what went differently or could be improved next time.

4 Stakeholder input

Last but not least, give members (and if applicable, clients) a space to share their perspective on why things went the way they did.

Instead of focusing on tangible outcomes, encourage your team members to dig deeper on what caused those results. For example, this might involve a discussion around internal processes and the project team structure.

There you have it. We hope that this post-mortem meeting agenda template (curated by our friends at Shopify) helps your team reflect back on the completed project and build a culture of continuous iteration and improvement.

When using this meeting template in Fellow, remember to take notes during the meeting, document decisions, and assign action items to specific team members. Good luck running your next post-mortem meeting!