The post-project review: turning one job into a better next one
The final cost report arrives three weeks after handover: the warehouse finished on time but four points under its estimated margin. The project manager has started a new job, the superintendent is on another site, and the estimator is pricing a similar building. Unless someone asks why this month, the next bid will repeat the same assumptions.
When a review happens only after a bad job, it turns into a search for blame, and when it has no format it collects opinions instead of numbers. The useful questions are narrower: where the outcome differed from the plan, why, and what will change. A good review compares plan with result on cost, time, quality and the client, and ends with changes that someone owns.
- Hold it within a month of completion, before people scatter: the project manager, superintendent, estimator, a lead foreman and whoever managed the client.
- Send the numbers a week ahead: estimate against final cost by major cost code, planned against actual milestones, labour hours against the estimate, the change order log, the deficiency count and the client's feedback.
- Take the four areas in turn — cost, time, quality, client — and state each gap before discussing causes.
- Separate what the team controlled — estimate assumptions, buying dates, crew planning — from events it did not, and spend the time on the first.
- Record what worked as well as what failed; practices worth repeating are the easiest lessons to lose.
- Turn each lesson into one change with an owner and a date: an estimating allowance, a kickoff question, a contract clause to watch.
- Check the changes at the next kickoff. A lesson nobody applied is only a note.
Recurring defects need their own routine; recording quality lessons covers turning them into checklist and briefing changes.
Common mistakes
- Reviewing only the jobs that lost money.
- Letting the loudest person decide the causes.
- Ending with observations and no owners.
- Filing the notes where the next estimator will never see them.
Action list
For your next review
- Book it before the team scatters
- Send the numbers a week ahead
- Go through cost, time, quality and client in turn
- Separate what you controlled from what you did not
- Write each lesson as a change with an owner and a date
- Put the changes on the next kickoff agenda
Check your understanding
A review concludes that the job lost money because the steel arrived late. Is "the supplier was late" a useful lesson?
