July 11, 2005 (Computerworld) --
Ask most IT managers why their organizations don't regularly conduct postmortem reviews on completed IT projects, and the typical response is, "We'd like to, but we just don't have the time or resources." But that hasn't stopped organizations such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Solo Cup Co. from regularly reviewing at least a portion of their completed IT projects. And while some of the reviews are done to see if a project met its anticipated objectives, many postmortems are conducted simply to determine what the project teams could have done better. In this age of austerity, either objective can be a win for IT as postmortems prove the business value of projects or boost continuous improvement efforts. "Each year, you want to do better than the previous year" in terms of project planning and project portfolio management, says Carl Stumpf, director of project and financial controls for the technology division at Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. (CME). But Stumpf is in the minority, according to Gartner Inc. Just 13% of Gartner's clients conduct such reviews, says Joseph Stage, a consultant at the Stamford, Conn.-based firm. There are a variety of reasons why postmortems aren't conducted, and some of them are defensive. "If the projects didn't accomplish what you set out to do, no one wants to go back and disclose that," particularly if such discoveries end up negatively impacting a project manager's performance review, says Tom Bugnitz, a consultant at Arlington, Mass.-based Cutter Consortium and a partner at The Beta Group, a St. Louis consulting firm. Ironically, the IT groups that need postmortems the most are probably the least likely to perform them. The notion of conducting a postmortem "would be viewed as a time sink" for an IT organization with immature project management capabilities, since it wouldn't be able to fully grasp the value to be gained, says Margo Visitacion, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. Seeking Returns But postmortems can pay off for companies that expend the time and resources to execute them properly. When the CME, a predominantly electronic futures exchange, went public in 2002, that placed "a lot of the risk on our side" in IT, says Mark Bennett, associate director of the project and financial controls group. To help mitigate some of that IT risk, the CME began conducting postmortem reviews on its two-dozen largest IT projects in late 2003. The exchange uses enterprise portfolio management software from Newport Beach, Calif.-based Artemis International Solutions Corp. to help project teams go back and evaluate their original objectives, risks and assumptions and determine whether projections for resources, capital and contractor fees were estimated accurately, says
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