6. Document what went wrong. What difficulties did you encounter? What assumptions proved incorrect? Compile a detailed list of your project's shortcomings. List at least ten things that turned out worse than expected. Document unpleasant mid-project surprises as well. My last project's greatest challenge was flushing out the design. I was developing a unique new type of game, and I experienced extreme difficulty trying to get all of the gameplay elements to coalesce into a unified whole that would be fun to play. I spent about two-thirds of the entire project on very painstaking level design, far more than expected.

7. Assess your risk management. Document all the risks you took during the project, and note how effectively you managed them. Did you explore experimental ideas, use new technology or development tools, or develop for a new platform? Did your schedule slip from poor estimation practices? Did you take big risks, or did you play it relatively safe? Assess your risk management experience, paying particular attention to how you would change your approach for the next project.

8. Assess mid-project changes. What unanticipated changes occurred throughout the project? How did you respond to them? Did you incorporate some great mid-project additions, or was excessive feature creep a problem? I was able to manage change effectively on my last project by designing flexibility into the game engine. But once the level design reached a certain point, most new changes had to be locked out in order to prevent corrupting previous work.

9. Draw meaningful conclusions. What conclusions can you draw from your project history that will help you improve in the future? What should you start doing, keep doing, or stop doing? Describe new practices you should try for your next project. This is perhaps the most important part of the postmortem, so be prepared to spend more time here than in any other section.

10. Take action. It would be a great waste of time to create a beautiful project postmortem, archive it, and forget about it. The final step is to develop an action plan that can be applied to your next project. Review your project history, reflect on the lessons you've learned, and specify new guidelines to follow in the future. I recommend creating a checklist for your next project. If you already have a checklist, then update it with new refinements.

Conclusion