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Project Management vocabulary · Closing a Project

Post-mortem

Meaning in project management, with examples

/ˌpoʊst ˈmɔːrtəm/nounCommon term

In project management, post-mortem means: A meeting or review held after a project or a serious problem has ended, to understand what happened, why, and what should be done differently next time.

In Turkish: proje sonrası değerlendirme, olay sonrası analiz, post-mortem

How it is used

Common in IT and tech companies, especially after outages or failed launches. Teams hold, run or write up a post-mortem. Many teams aim for a blameless post-mortem that focuses on systems, not on blaming individuals.

Example sentences

  1. We'll do a post-mortem on Friday to understand why the release failed.

  2. The post-mortem showed that nobody had tested the backup process.

Common collocations

  • hold a post-mortem
  • blameless post-mortem
  • post-mortem report
  • project post-mortem
  • lessons learnedThe useful knowledge a team gains from a project, both from what went well and from what went wrong, recorded so future projects can benefit.
  • retrospectiveA regular team meeting at the end of a sprint or project to discuss what went well, what did not and what to change in the next cycle.
  • project closureThe final phase of a project, when the work is formally completed: deliverables are accepted, contracts are closed, the team is released and documents and lessons are archived.
  • issueA problem that is already happening and affects the project, so someone needs to take action to solve it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Closing a Project

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