Project Life Cycle - Post implementation phase

It seems very important for an organization to continuously improve its Project Life Cycle. To do so, it is necessary to implement a workflow which will enable you to collect and share lessons learned. That would also be the best moment to meet the user representatives to estimate the real ROI which have been provided by the realization of the project. It will enable you to improve your knowledge and maybe processes in the future.

As for me, I defined at first the objectives. The post implementation phase shall bring to the company a better overview on:

• The real ROI brought by the realization
• A general feedback on the functionalities implemented
• Overall system satisfaction
• Idea on new functionalities which shall be developed

Here are the main challenges you may meet to reach these goals:

• Identify the user representatives: as project team members are not all the time the future user, it may be difficult to directly identify the user representatives
• Solicit and get feedback: an effective way of getting feedback needs to be implemented. This could mean direct user interviews, questionnaires send via email, online questionnaires…
• Get “correct” feedback: users are always waiting for the best as the first release. When gathering feedback during post implementation session, try to get a correct overview on what was the purpose of the system implementation and was it met. A short knowledge on the project and the functionalities which have been developed may be necessary to lead such an interview

First of all you will have to be able to identify projects on which you want to conduct a post implementation review. This may depends on the number of projects you manage in your organization, the project category, the clients…

Once you defined the impacted projects, you shall define when the post implementation review shall be conducted. This shall be separate from the close of your project (a Project Close survey can also be done but the result will not be the same). The post implementation review and the project close survey do not focus on the same thing. The first one is system related and the second is project related. You may for example decide to conduct the post implementation interview 6 months after having closed the project. By doing that, you will be able to discuss with the users and get real opinion on the project benefits, support, maintenance fees, easy of use… It is too early during the close phase of a project to get such a feedback.

Then you need to create a set of question you can raise to reach your objectives:

• How many hours per employee did you save?
• How much the system increased your ability to accept new contract?
• Are you using all developed functionalities?
• How easy to use is the system?
• Do you get good support when there are system crash or bugs?
• …

As the user representatives as well as the IT Senior managers and Business representatives may be interest in the post implementation review results, it would be better to plan a report template. This can be done in a MS Word document or through a MS Powerpoint presentation. This depends on the regularity you conduct the reviews and would like to provide results. It is also worth to plan regular sessions to share lessons learned.

Thibaut