MBA1216 How to Conduct a 15 Minute Post-Mortem After Projects

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The February 2025 Nielsen report. Ready to Save on New Tech it's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that doesn't waste your time but gets down to tactical information. You need to build a better business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to conduct 15 minute post mortems after you just completed a project. A post mortem is a quick discussion with your team to take a look at how the project went and to agree on ways to improve for the next project. Many of us, we're such in a rush to keep improving and keep growing our business. We don't take the time to just take 15 minutes to analyze what we're doing, how we're doing and how we can improve. Doing this simple 5 part 15 minute post mortem is going to help your company run a whole lot smoother and you're going to feel the sense of wow, we're improving. Every single month, every single year. Post mortems force you and your team to take a hard look at what you're doing and seeing what you can do differently. This is what's key. Do differently so you can fine tune your weld oiled machine. I'm going to give you the formula in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Postmortems are best done after a project. Now I say a project because it has to be something that you've worked on that's quite significant. It takes some time and some collaboration with your team. This could be a two week project, it could be a Two month project. But I would say something that takes you at least two weeks to do, to complete, to pull off this could be a new website design or even changing a few sales pages. And even if you don't have a team and it's just you, you can still conduct this postmortem to improve. And it's good practice to start, even when you're just small, because you want to be able to continue to do this as a regular practice when you start hiring people on the team. Our team at Webinar Ninja, our software, we do postmortems once a month because that's our development cycle. Every month we do a major project to improve the software. In fact, tonight I have a meeting with my team to do a postmortem for our last. It takes 15 minutes, but it makes a world of a difference. And it's five simple steps. It's five simple questions. You as a group answer. Now, it's your job as the leader of your company who's conducting this postmortem to hold your team accountable and to hold them to this discussion. You got to do it every single time you do a project. And I would tie it with a meeting so everybody knows on the agenda this is what you're doing. You also want to make sure it doesn't go too long. So you got five questions that you're going to discuss as a group and you have 15 minutes. That means three minutes a question. And you'll see when I share the questions, you can do this in three minutes a piece. And sometimes it takes us less than 15 minutes. So let's start. Let me give you the formula for the post mortem. The five questions or the five steps. The first question is that you're going to answer objectively, what did you get done on this project? I want you to just see this as like, what did you deliver? What did you actually do? What did you produce? So in our example with Webinar Ninja, we would list the things that we released to our customers. Well, we released an integration with ConvertKit and HubSpot. We also released three new templates for our page builder. We also added, you know, these five new functionalities to the page builder software inside of Webinar Ninja. That's what we did. We also improved a few features, fixed a few bugs. But in general, the project, we did these things. This is what we got done. So that's question number one. Objectively, what did you produce? What did you do? The next question is, what went well? What did you do right in this project in the last month in our example. And you're gonna go around the team and for us, we're just gonna discuss, hey, here are a few things that we did right? We met regularly during the week, and because of that, we met our weekly deadlines and therefore we met the deadlines for the project. Well, what else did we do right? Well, we introduced daily syncs to make sure everybody is communicating and if they're blocked, they voice it. They also let everybody know what everybody's working on. That was helpful. What else did we do right? We solved a few challenges we had during the process quickly, and we solved a few problems in a creative way through our meetings. So you're going to answer that question as a group. And what I want you to do is if you could do this on a video call or in person, it'd be great to document this either on a whiteboard or on your screen with a text document or on a trello board or whatever you want to write down as you're speaking, hey, here are the answers to these questions. What we did, what we actually got done. The next question is, what do we do right? The third question is, what can be improved? Let's take a look and let's try to be a little bit self critical. What could we improve in our team in the way we handled the project? What could we have done differently? And you need to give your team license to make some critical statements and some of those statements will be geared towards you. This has happened to me where it's like, guys have to be honest with me. And like they say, well, we need a little bit more, you know, communication or we want to be included in certain decisions. And I had to take on that feedback and I had to change. I had to do things differently. So we had a better project cycle the next time around. So you got to let them know, hey, you have a license to give critical feedback now. This is not a complaining fest. It's just like, hey, I think we could do better here. I think we can do much better there. So in our example, we might say, I think we could have given our customer service team a couple extra days to test some of the things that we're developing so they weren't under so much pressure the last two weeks. And then we can, you know, write that down in our notes. Try your very best to have at least one answer to this question. What you can improve? Fourth step, or the fourth question in the postmortem is what will we continue to do? Right? Moving Forward now. We just looked backwards. We talked about the project, talked about what we did, we talked about what went right, what went wrong. Now we're going to look forward in step four and five. What will we continue to do? What did we do last cycle? Last project that really worked for us? And we're going to continue to do well. We're going to continue to meet at a regular basis. We're going to continue to do the daily syncs that really helped. We're going to continue to have each meeting start with a demo of the project or the designs that we're doing for the next piece of the project. You might think this is repetitive. Like, hey, didn't we talk about what went right? No, it's a different mindset. You want to talk about what you're going to continue to do moving forward. This is like a promise, this is like a commitment. Hey, we're all, as a team, committed and agreeing to doing this in the next project starting today, Right? Because the next project is starting today. Because we just finished a project. And I like to do these five questions this postmortem at the start of the meeting. Because after the last question, after we do, you know, question four, then question five, we talk about the next project, and we're committed to. To doing the same things that did work for us before. We don't lose out on good habits. We continue to do the good habits. So question four is what we'll continue to do. We list those things down. Question five, you probably guessed it. What will we do differently in this next project? And this basically goes hand in hand with what we can improve. So you're going to list down this is what we're going to do differently. These are action items. See, the difference between questions four and five and questions two and three is that two and three are just a brain dump. And four and five are like, okay, this is our action items. This is what we're gonna do. This is our mandates. She said, these are our mandates, right? These are our marching orders. We gotta do these things. So we're gonna continue to do these things. That's number four. Number five, this is what we're gonna do differently. See how it's in a positive tone? We're gonna do these things differently. The reason why I want you to document these answers because you're gonna reference these answers in your meetings throughout the project. And that's it. 15 minutes, you're done. You discuss as a group, you jot down the answers. You're saying, here's the first question. And as they're discussing, as they're providing answers, you're jotting down answers and you're just keeping track of time. How much time has passed? It's been two minutes, three minutes. Okay, let's move on to the next one. And you're basically taking minutes and allowing your team to come up with the answers.

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So now you know the five questions for your 15 minute post mortem. What did you get done? What went right? What can be improved? What you'll continue to do? What will you do differently? Post mortems are not only good because it helps you really recap what happened, but it's also a chance for you to praise your team and say, hey, we're improving. Last month we actually implemented the things that we said we're going to improve on. People like routine, they like to have the feeling of repetition, feeling that, hey, we're doing something that's organized, that's on track and it's going to earn you brownie points as a leader and as a manager. And these things don't just happen by themselves. You have to do it for your team. You have to deliver these things. You have to guide them. And after a few times, you can even just hand over the reins to one of the people on the team. Or you can take turns and say, hey, you lead the postmortem this time where they ask the questions and they jot down the notes. Well, there you have it, guys. Trust me, this really, really is helpful. It's very admin y, but it totally is worth it. Try it out and let me know how it goes. Email me@omar mba net I would love to share your success story right here on the podcast. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's stitcher Radio, tunein Radio, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast. We're on everything. By hitting subscribe you automatically get the next episode right to your device so it's there ready for you when you're ready to listen. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Self awareness and self reflection is not only good for personal development, it's great for business development. Understanding you're not perfect, understanding there's always room for improvement. Your team will respect you and will really admire you more if you recognize that and you put these things into practice. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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