Let the past improve the future: Post-action reviews of legal projects

It's said that hindsight is 20/20. It is only on the plane home from the partners' meeting, after the lateral partner names are added to the website, or when the new office opens for business that we recognise what we could have or should have done differently. In that transitory moment of clarity, we know how to avoid future missteps and reinforce success.

To avoid insanity, which is defined by Albert Einstein as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results", we must change our future actions based on a comprehensive study of the past.

Post-action reviews are studies in project hindsight focused on performance standards intended to document what happened, why it happened and how the organisation might sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses. Assigned to someone outside of the project, an independent, unbiased post-action review uncovers processes and decisions in need of revision and highlights accomplishments without blame or bragging.

At the White & Case knowledge department, we gather project feedback through online surveys and one-on-one interviews with critical team members and others who benefited from a project's success.

Our surveys and interviews are formed around three questions:

1. What worked well?

2. What didn't work well?

3. What should we change in future?

While seemingly simple, these questions uncover and articulate the truths of a project. They provide 'start, stop and continue' insights that tell us what we should start and stop doing and what best practices we should continue doing.

We've learned that even successful projects have operational challenges. For example, we may find that a project experienced a lack of resources, insufficient communications or an inattentive sponsor.

We are pleased to document that our projects are generally well defined, our team members are engaged and our projects are completed within 15 per cent of their targeted deadlines. But, it wasn't until we compared the analysis of multiple projects that we identified a shared common weakness - lack of resources. Separately, our post-action reviews were merely interesting historical data, but not actionable. Analysed as a group, they provided the knowledge we needed to influence decisions, especially around resource allocation.

Post-action reviews don't end with the final presentation to the team; they inspire and direct future projects. Project teams are usually elated, if not relieved, at project completion. Eager to move on to the next challenge, they often find rehashing the past frivolous, if not annoying. Engaged leaders and project sponsors must insist that project lifecycles extend extensively past 'go live' dates. A post-action review should be included as the final mandatory step - there should be no celebratory cake and punch until it is filed!

Saving post-action review results for later review allows team members to incorporate historical lessons learned into specific, structured processes for the future.

In a recent project, although the hands-on team agreed that particular decisions had been made, they couldn't remember why. Consequently, the team wasted time revisiting and re-deciding key project points.

The easy and excellent lesson from this was that we should stop relying on memory for why decisions are made and start documenting them when they are made for later reference. The challenge, however, was creating and implementing a concrete, standard process to address this lesson. Our solution was to create a matrix for project managers to fill out on a regular basis, which has become a standard template for following the project's progress.

For the greatest value to any organisation, post-action reviews must not be a luxury, conducted only when you have the extra manpower and time; they must be a required part of every initiative. As Winston Churchill once said, "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it".