Jory MacKay on June 25, 2025 How to run a successful post-mortem meeting (with meeting template)
🎁 Bonus Material: Free Post-Mortem Meeting Agenda Template
According to a 2024 survey of project managers, just 40% of teams capture post-project lessons learned.
While some people might think this number seems high (who has time to reflect when you’ve got a never ending list of tasks and projects to get started on?) the reality is that:
If you’re not reviewing, learning, and acting on your project outcomes, you’re at risk of falling behind the high-performing teams that are.
Project post-mortem meetings are a great way to reflect on project performance, identifying what worked well and what could be improved for the future. As a leader, this enables you to reduce mistakes at work, reinforce a strong culture, turbocharge team performance, and build strong relationships with stakeholders and clients.
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Try it for yourself: Download our free post-mortem meeting template and put this article to practice today.
What is a post-mortem meeting? What are the benefits of running one?
A project post-mortem meeting is a meeting held after a project is completed to identify what went well and what could be improved for the future. Post-mortems produce lessons learned that, if properly documented and acted upon, enable future projects to improve performance and avoid costly mistakes.
There’s a common misconception that post-mortems should only be used when projects fail — but this couldn’t be more wrong.
Post-mortem meetings bring benefits no matter what the outcome of your project, including:
- Learning from your project’s outcome. Whether a project was a success or a failure, there’s always something you can learn from it. Whether it’s unexpected risks, the impacts of key decisions, or how well a new stakeholder management technique worked, there’s always knowledge to share.
- Turning mistakes into meaningful changes. Project mistakes often lead to impacts on scope, budget, or timelines. Post-mortems enable teams to share their mistakes, reducing the chance of them happening again. Not only does this avoid future costs, it increases the chance of greater process success overall.
- Fostering team communication and collaboration. Post-mortems are a great opportunity to bring teams together, foster communication, and boost collaboration. Whether it’s sharing in success or laughing off silly mistakes, they’re a great way to strengthen the bond between project professionals.
- Reinforcing good culture and behaviors. Owning mistakes and celebrating successes are core pillars of a great company environment. Post-mortems promote both of these behaviors, reinforcing a strong and healthy team culture.
- Creating stakeholder and client transparency. When completed with stakeholders and clients, post-mortem meetings help build trust, transparency, and strong relationships. This sets the foundation for future projects, building psychological safety across the board for internal and external teams.
You may already be running post-mortem meetings, without even realizing it. You may also know a post-mortem meeting as a: Lessons learned meetings, project debrief, retrospective (for Agile and scrum teams), project wrap-up meeting, post-implementation review, or project closure meeting.
No matter the name, the goal is the same: reflect on your work, document what worked (and what didn’t), and consistently get better.
How to prepare for a successful post-mortem meeting
While project post-mortem meetings seem simple, they shouldn’t be underestimated. Like many things in business, to get the most out of your post-mortem meetings, you should invest time in proper planning and come along with a defined agenda.
If you don’t, post-mortem meetings risk becoming a waste of everyone’s time, losing the opportunity to identify learnings for the future. Worse still, without a formal agenda, they can also turn into a “blame game” session, creating long-term impacts on team morale and culture.
To help you prepare for your first post-mortem session, here are some ways to build a solid foundation that leads to a productive session.
1. Plant the seed in your project kick off
Most projects run for months, or even years, so capturing lessons learned needs to be something your team does throughout the project lifecycle. Naturally, you won’t complete your post-mortem until the end, but you can be collecting insights from day one.
- Set the tone in your project kick off. As part of your project kick off meeting, encourage everyone to capture what’s working well, and what isn’t, as the project progresses. You can even include this in your project charter to ensure everyone buys into the continuous improvement mindset.
- Plan mini retrospectives. Again, you don’t need to wait until your post-mortem to share feedback across the team. Plan mini retrospective sessions at key points and milestones in your project to reflect on the good and the bad and adjust your plans accordingly.
2. Plan the meeting before the end of the project
Timing is key to get the most value out of a project post-mortem meeting. Do it too early, and the team will be distracted closing down the project. Do it too late, and you risk the team moving on and becoming focused on new things.
- Schedule early. Get your project post-mortem invites into the calendar early to ensure you hit the sweet spot while the project’s still fresh in the mind. Cross-reference this against your project schedule, but give yourself some room in case the final parts of the project get delayed.
- Add your post-mortem as a task in your project management tool. Tools like Planio help you to get ahead of busy calendars by plotting out your end-to-end project journey, managing tasks, and providing a single place for the team to collaborate.
3. Organize and share a meeting agenda
It’s always good practice to share an agenda before a meeting, and a project post-mortem is no different. Share the structure and key topics of the meeting ahead of time to give everyone the chance to prepare.
There are two key elements you should include when preparing your team for a post-mortem meeting:
1. Key agenda items. All good post-mortems have a mix of reflection and collaborative inputs. Here’s an example of a classic lessons learned agenda:
- Introduction and welcome
- Recap of the project mission and objectives
- Baseline vs. actuals review — cost, time, and budget
- Group discussion — what went well?
- Group discussion — what could have done better?
- Group discussion — learnings for future projects
- Wrap up and close
2. Pre-meeting questionnaire. To get team members thinking and give you some talking points to work from, you can also send out a pre-meeting questionnaire, which questions such as::
- What do you think we did well as a project team?
- What are you most proud of from this project?
- Do you think we achieved the project objectives?
- What was the most frustrating thing about this project?
- What caused the project to slow down?
- What would you do differently if we did this project again?
4. Revisit your project kick-off and business case documents
Project post-mortems must strike the balance between data-led insights on cost, time, and scope performance, and a subjective view of the team’s ways of working. To achieve this, it’s good to dig out your early project artifacts to review how you performed against the benchmark.
- Review your business case. Re-review your original business case or scope of work to remind yourself of the project’s objectives, budget, scope, and key milestones. Then, compare your actuals to get a gauge of performance.
- Refer back to your project kick-off pack. Your project kick off presentation will likely include some intangible details, such as ways of working, team roles and responsibilities, and project assumptions. You can use this information to discuss how things played out during the project lifecycle.
Project post-mortem meetings are the perfect way to promote good work and reflect on improvement areas.
5. Assign a moderator and notetaker
Project post-mortem meetings always stir up healthy debate, so ensure you bring some balance and order to the agenda. Assign someone to moderate and help control the conversation. If you can, it’s also a great idea to find someone who can also capture notes.
- Keep the meeting moving. We’ve all been in meetings that go off course and feel like a waste of time. To help you get the balance right, check out our guide to running fast and efficient meetings.
- Use Planio to structure your content. Planio’s Wiki brings your thoughts, notes, and actions to life with rich text, robust formatting tools, and links to project repositories. The structure is entirely customizable, with changes tracked as your collective lessons learned grows over time. Learn more about the Knowledge Management Wiki here.
6. Kick off the meeting and clarify the rules, objectives, expectations
With the pre-prep done, it’s time to plan how you’ll kick off your first project post-mortem meeting. Like all good meetings, it’s best to start by clarifying the purpose of the meeting, the rules, and the expectations of everyone involved. This helps keep things on track and avoids the session turning into a moan-fest!
- Brush up on conflict management. Despite the best will in the world, post-mortem meetings can become heated, especially if a project has failed. Be prepared by brushing up on your conflict resolution skills before the meeting in case you need them.
- Mix up the engagement styles. Not everyone is comfortable sharing in front of big groups, so mix up the way attendees participate. Whether it’s writing post-it notes on a wall, or using digital tools to capture poll responses, make sure you cater to everyone’s needs to maximize engagement.
7. Create a template for your post-meeting recap and action items
Lastly, it’s good to be prepared for how you’ll distribute and track actions after the post-mortem meeting. Having a prepared template for both of these moments saves you from scratching around after the meeting, while allowing you to distribute follow-ups quickly and effectively.
- Keep meeting notes concise. Meeting notes work best when they’re sharp and to-the-point, rather than long blocks of boring text. For more guidance, check out our guide on how to write better meeting notes.
- Make your actions actionable. Like meeting notes, post-meeting actions need to be clear to ensure everyone reaches the desired outcome. Our actions item template is perfect for this, ensuring you capture the what, why, when, and who of every action you identify.
Post-mortem meeting agenda and recap template: Use this to get started
Following the guide above can help ensure you cover all the bases with your post-mortem meeting. But for even more help, use this free template to structure the session and document your next steps and action items.
Five post-mortem best practices
While most people agree that reflecting on projects is a good thing to do, it can feel like an unnecessary admin exercise at times.
To make it easier for team members to engaged and to help you get the most out of the exercise, here are some best practices to follow:
- Capture lessons learned throughout the project. Don’t wait until the very end to document what’s going on. Keep a running public document (or Planio Wiki) to capture lessons learned throughout the entire project.
- Make post-project info easy to find. Project teams often put good work into post-mortems, but the nuggets of information quickly get lost. Use your project management tool to save lessons learned in an accessible place that’s easy to find.
- Make lessons learned a formal part of project closure. To ensure post-mortems happen, make them a mandatory task when closing a project. This means project managers won’t forget to complete them before rushing off to their next project.
- Manage the loudest, more senior voices. Like all meetings, the loudest/most senior team members can dominate the conversation. Look to overcome this by mixing up the engagement styles, using a pre-meeting questionnaire to capture unbiased feedback, and even running multiple smaller sessions with different audiences.
- Don’t forget to capture what went well. Project post-mortems have a tendency to focus on the bad rather than the good. This makes them difficult to engage with and not fully representative of your project journey. Make sure every session has adequate time to focus on what went well and provides opportunities to celebrate your successes.
Final thoughts: Creating a culture of accountability and trust benefits everyone
The world’s best teams constantly reflect on how they can improve, so why should project teams be any different?
Project post-mortem meetings are the perfect way to promote good work and reflect on improvement areas.
But, like all meetings, if you don’t prepare for them properly, they’re doomed to fail. This can be easily overcome in post-mortem meetings by setting a clear agenda, putting in the pre-work, and by using a structured lessons learned template.
Even easier, is letting a project management tool like Planio do the heavy lifting for you.
Planio includes scheduling and data storage features that are perfect for post-mortems. Clear project timelines help you schedule your meeting at the optimal point, with the Wiki acting as a customizable place to capture structured feedback that’s easily accessible for future project teams.
Try Planio for your own team — free for 30 days (with no credit card required!)
