I agree, postmortem does sound somewhat gloomy. Maybe this term is so common in the software industry because many projects in fact require a postmortem ;)

Lidor

One team i was on used to do a ’swot’ analysis along the way, to identify “strengths weaknesses opportunities threats” — this was a nice way to achieve a similar result.

i’ve always found it hard to convince people to do a ‘post mortem’ maybe because the name has such grisly connotations. the benefit isn’t implied by the name — death is implied. ’swot’ is an easier concept to sell to people.

love your graphics on this article.
cheers
lb

I wait until the projet post-mortem - carefully write up what we should have done, then get in my time machine and and drop the project assement on my desk at project inception. This leads to very clean designs and very accurate design docs. We avoid a lot of bugs this way too.