Post-implementation review: what to assess six months after go-live

Most technology projects are declared complete at go-live. The project team disperses, the steering committee stops meeting, and the organisation moves on to the next initiative. Six months later, the system is in production, but whether it is delivering what was expected is a question that often goes unasked. A post-implementation review is the structured exercise that answers it.

What a review is not ¶

A post-implementation review is not a retrospective on the project process. It is not an opportunity to assign blame for things that went wrong during implementation. It is an assessment of whether the system, as it is currently operating, is delivering the outcomes that were identified as the objectives at the start of the project.

That distinction matters because the two exercises require different information and different participants. A process retrospective involves the project team. An outcomes assessment involves the people using the system and the stakeholders who defined the original objectives.

The questions worth asking ¶

The review starts from the original business case or project charter. What outcomes were expected? By what measure? At what point in time? Those questions are often harder to answer than they should be, because the original objectives were not stated in measurable terms. That finding is itself useful information.

For each objective, the review assesses what actually happened. Where outcomes were achieved, the review identifies what contributed to that. Where they were not, it identifies the specific gap and whether it is addressable through configuration, process change, or additional training.

• Were the original objectives stated in measurable terms?
• What outcomes were achieved, and what evidence supports that?
• Where outcomes were not achieved, what is the specific gap?
• What workarounds are currently in use, and what do they indicate?
• What would need to change to close the remaining gaps?

Using the review to plan the next phase ¶

A post-implementation review that produces only a backward-looking assessment is half the work. The more useful output is a forward-looking set of recommendations: what should be addressed in the next six months, what requires a more significant intervention, and what can be accepted as a known limitation of the current system.

That output gives the organisation a clear starting point for the next phase of work, grounded in what actually happened rather than what was planned.

The organisations that get the most from their technology investments are the ones that treat go-live as a milestone rather than an endpoint.