Post-mortem (agency)

A structured review conducted after a project ends, examining what happened — including budget, scope, and timeline performance — to identify patterns and improve future engagements.

Example

A project post-mortem reveals the team delivered 22 hours of unbilled, undocumented scope changes across the engagement, prompting a review of why those requests weren't caught and change-ordered at the time.

Why it matters for agencies

A post-mortem that specifically reviews scope and budget variance, not just "how did it go" generally, is what surfaces the pattern of where and why unbilled work is happening — information that's hard to see clearly in the moment, project by project, without stepping back to look at the aggregate.