The Impact of Debriefing on Future Performance of Projects

Debriefing (or: retrospectives, formal inquiry, final report, etc.) is a common process, used to improve future performance of projects. The objective of this study is to test the hypothesis that a recommended standard debriefing for project planning, improves performance, as compared to a free style analysis. Two project scenarios were generated, of which one is more complicated than the other; participants were requested to improve the plan of each. During the first set of experiments they were asked to analyze the scenarios to the best of their ability, and in the second they were asked to use a debriefing template for the analysis. Testing the hypothesis for the simpler project scenario, the standard debriefing may lead to a small performance improvement compared to a free style analysis. Testing the hypothesis for the complicated scenario found to lead to negligible performance improvement over the free style analysis. It is important to notice that many participants were not able to generate an improved plan for the complicated scenario, regardless of the analysis style. The results of the experiments indicate that the use of a standard debriefing, recommended by previous researchers, may lead to a limited performance improvement, if at all, compared to a free style analysis of knowledgeable individuals. That is, as long as debriefing is used as part of "lessons learned" it is less important whether it uses a formal structure or not. The negligible improvement for the complicated scenario may imply that in such cases debriefings should be complemented with advanced analysis tools to aid in extracting and implementing the lessons learned.