Unlocking Strategic Value: The Importance of Post-Implementation Reviews
As a project sponsor, it might be tempting to move on once your project transitions to business-as-usual (BAU). However, staying connected through a post-implementation review (PIR) is critical for ensuring lasting success and unlocking strategic value.
In Brief:
Delivering Finance or Supply Chain projects can be an intense affair for sponsors. You spend the best part of several months living and breathing the project, watching it like a hawk to ensure it stays on track, and eagerly awaiting the planned benefits.
At some point, ideally within six-to-nine months after kick-off (if you’ve adopted the carved elephant approach to project delivery), the project stops being a project and becomes part of your BAU. If you’re employing the right tools, you might even be moving two projects into BAU after six or so months.
Of course, if your project delivery plan has robust change management built into it, there will still be ongoing work to be done around adoption and integration, particularly at the end-user level. However, for all intents and purposes, your work as a sponsor is done. Time to move on to the next piece of improvement work, right?
Unfortunately, the answer to this question is “not quite”. While you can and should be preparing to move on to the next piece of work, it’s important to stay connected to your most recent “baby”. This is where the vital importance of the (often neglected) post-implementation review (PIR) comes in.
What is a post-implementation review - and why is it important?
In simple terms, a PIR is a backward-facing assessment of a project’s performance and effectiveness. It is conducted a certain amount of time after the completion of a project – usually six months – to check whether objectives have been met and whether the organisation is receiving the anticipated benefits.
In our experience, some organisations do PIRs really well. The process is taken seriously, with oversight from the project sponsor, and the strategic value of the PIR is understood and accepted.
Towards the other end of the spectrum, it’s sometimes the case that the six-month PIR is treated more like a “tick a box” exercise. Did we meet budget? Tick. Did we deliver it on time? Tick. Is the system being used? Tick. PIR completed, let’s move on.
In worst case scenarios, the review may be missed altogether. There are numerous causes for this, and very few of them are deliberate or nefarious. Perhaps the project didn’t have an appropriate level of executive-level sponsorship, so it’s fallen off the radar (and hence, the priority list). Perhaps key members of staff have departed or moved onto other priorities.
Or perhaps everything seems to be going well with the new tool or system, so assessing it just isn’t a pressing priority. This is dangerous territory to be in. No matter how well things seem to be going, it’s always critical to go back and check your work. There may be value you’re leaving on the table, or incremental tweaks and improvements that can provide even greater benefit to the business.
How can you turn your PIR into a meaningful activity?
The good news is that your PIR doesn’t have to be time- or resource-intensive. In fact, just like your approach to measuring project success and demonstrating value, the better approach is to focus on the right things, rather than lots of things.
It is indeed critical to assess the project in terms of adoption, budget and schedule after six months. However, our guidance for sponsors is always to lead with the strategic lens. This means three things in practice.
- Revisit the original strategy. Now is the time to dig out the strategic plan for the project (usually the original business case). Is the project delivering what you (or a predecessor) said it would? If you defined an ROI narrative in the original business case, are you achieving it?
- Measure the right things. At six months, your project KPIs should all be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound). In the early days of the project shifting to BAU, you can look at more tactical metrics such as adoption statistics and logins – and these are critical measures of early success. However, six months down the track your system should be delivering tangible benefits. Capturing these is critical.
- Be ready to get analytical. If something isn’t quite where it should be, it’s time to undertake a root cause analysis. Whether it’s something in the system, process adherence (better known as people not doing what they should be, or knowledge or data not being where they should be), or some other factor – the earlier the issue is uncovered and addressed, the better.
To sum up, we always encourage Finance and Supply Chain project to treat six-month PIRs with the same strategic importance as the delivery of the project itself. They offer an exceptional opportunity to demonstrate the value of the team’ hard work, as well as make improvements and solve issues – before they become major problems.
Finally, projects that are delivered well will almost always open the door to future improvement projects – which is good news for everyone.
Cornerstone Performance Management are enablers of change and transformation in Supply Chain, Information Management, Financial Planning & Analytics, Management Consulting, Project Management, and Managed Application Services. Meet our team or reach out to have a discussion today.
