Post-Mortem Review

Many IT projects fail. Most of the failures are due to human error, misunderstanding, process problems and from time to time, technical gaffs. Root causes - systemic internalised practices that lead regularly to broken solutions - are analysed to find why what went wrong went wrong. A Post-Mortem Review presents a in-depth root-cause analysis study of a failed IT project that resulted in some customers arrested and others fired from jobs. The outcome had significant business and technical ramifications as a consequence. The case study presents a detailed and annotated interview with an executive who was involved in the project as well as a detailed analysis of it. Proposed solution opportunities are presented to address the root cause failures. There are so few documented post-mortem reviews that this will be a book to benefit any student studying project management at undergraduate or postgraduate level. It is astonishing how seemingly small things in an IT project that go unchecked can escalate into huge project failures before anyone notices. In this particular case, by the time they did notice, the damage had been done. The case study also makes use of goal and context modelling techniques in order to show how the opportunities for improvements could be represented to provide greater understanding in moving forwards from the project failure, and most importantly, learning from the mistakes made. Learn about the root cause analysis process, how to identify and classify impacts, symptoms, root causes and opportunities and how to structure a report to a client for this kind of investigative IT project.