In recent years, IT project failures have received a great deal of attention in the press as
well as the boardroom. In an attempt to avoid disasters going forward, many organizations
are now learning from the past by conducting retrospectives—that is, project postmortems
or post-implementation reviews. While each individual retrospective tells a unique story
and contributes to organizational learning, even more insight can be gained by examining
multiple retrospectives across a variety of organizations over time. This research
aggregates the knowledge gained from 99 retrospectives conducted in 74 organizations
over the past seven years. It uses the fndings to reveal the most common mistakes and
suggest best practices for more effective project management