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Post-Project Customer Evaluations and Implementation Reviews
Project Management · Chapter 10: Project Closure and Post-Completion ReviewSection 10.4 · lesson 66 of 7312 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Gather customer feedback and test realized benefits against the business case.
- Compare surveys, interviews, feedback forms and structured debriefs for customer evaluation
- Write specific, neutral, single-issue evaluation questions and name response problems
- Rate each business case benefit as met, partly met or not yet visible from evidence
- Report shortfalls by cause rather than blame and route findings to those who can act
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Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,581 words). Read along, or search it.
Opening Question
Satisfied Customer, Unproven Benefits
Four months after the Riverside clinic opened, Priya is back in its lobby. Helen has asked her to run the post-implementation review. The figures are made up. Grace, the clinic manager, says the new scheduling system is satisfactory. In a short evaluation, her front-desk staff rated it four out of five for ease of use. So, did Riverside deliver what its business case promised? A happy customer and a delivered benefit are different questions.
Why Look Later
Feedback and Benefits Arrive After Closure
Closure ends the work, but not what can be known about it. Two kinds of information arrive only later. The customer's view, once they've lived with the result. And the realized benefits, the improvements the business case promised, which show up only after the result has been in use long enough to change the work. A project can pass acceptance, meet its cost result, and produce an excellent closure report, and still not deliver what the organization wanted. Two activities look for that gap: the customer evaluation, which collects the customer's judgment, and the post-implementation review, which compares realized results with the business case.
Evaluation Methods
Surveys, Interviews, Forms and Debriefs
A customer evaluation is a structured collection of the customer's judgment of the delivery, and of working with the team. Four methods are common. A survey: the same questions sent to many people. It's cheap and comparable, but can't follow up an unexpected answer. An interview: one person, prepared questions. It's deep, but slow, and the few views heard may not be typical. A feedback form, filled in at a natural moment like handover, catches views while fresh, but answers are short. A structured debrief, a facilitated meeting, lets disagreements surface, but confident voices can dominate. Each misses something the others find, so a short survey plus a few interviews usually reveals more than either alone.
Question Design
Specific, Neutral, Single-Issue Questions
Answers are only as good as the questions. Be specific: were the appointment reports easy to read, not did the project go well. Be neutral: how helpful was our excellent support team invites praise. How would you describe the support you received doesn't. Ask one thing per question: the speed and quality of training can't be answered if training was fast, but poor. And mix rated items, for comparison, with open items, for reasons nobody thought to ask about. Priya's form has five items: rated questions on communication, on whether the result matches what was agreed, and on training; then two open questions, on what to do differently, and what's still missing.
Quick Check
Spotting a Leading Question
Quick check. A draft question reads: how much did the wonderful new reminder-text service help you? What's wrong with it? Pause, and decide. It leads the respondent. Wonderful tells people the answer you want. It asks only one thing, so it isn't double-barreled. And an open question can be added to the form, but it wouldn't fix the leading word.
Response Problems
Return Rate, Courtesy Bias and Small Samples
Even good questions can mislead, so name four response problems in any report that uses the results. First, a low return rate: responses divided by forms sent. Send a hundred twenty forms, get thirty back, and the return rate is twenty-five percent. The three quarters who stayed silent may think differently. Second, courtesy bias: favorable answers given to be polite, especially face to face. Third, unrepresentative respondents: only the enthusiastic, or only the angry, or managers answering for users they rarely see. Fourth, small numbers. Three satisfied answers out of four is seventy-five percent, but one more answer moves it to eighty, or to sixty. So report the count, not just the percentage. Remedies: keep it short, send a reminder, promise the answers are used to improve and not to blame, and ask the people who actually use the result.
Post-Implementation Review
Testing Results Against the Business Case
The post-implementation review Helen asked for is different. It's a structured examination, some time after handover, of whether the result works in use, and whether the business case's benefits were realized. The evaluation records how the customer feels about the delivery. The review tests results against evidence. Timing: long enough for staff to learn the result and for effects to show up in records, but not so long that the people and papers have dispersed. A few months is typical, or a full cycle when effects are seasonal. Scope: use, support and benefits, without reopening settled matters like contract terms. Participants: users, support staff, the benefit owner, and someone independent of the project team, since people reviewing their own work tend to find it good. The sponsor and the project management office receive the findings.
Review Questions
Use, Support and Realized Benefits
Three groups of review questions recur. Is the result used as intended? Who uses it, how often, and have users found workarounds? A workaround is valuable evidence that something doesn't fit how people work. Are support needs met? How many help requests, about what, whether the support agreed at handover is enough, and whether training covered what users needed. And were the benefits realized? For each one, what changed in the records, and by how much. Each question should be answerable with evidence, like logs, records and observation, not just opinion.
Benefit Status
Comparing Each Benefit With Evidence
The business case listed the benefits that justified Riverside, each with an expected result. The review compares each with evidence, one row per benefit: expected, evidence source, observed, and status. Three statuses are enough. Met: the expected result was reached. Partly met: it improved, but fell short. Not yet visible: the evidence is too limited, or too early, for a fair judgment. Missed appointments were to fall from eight in a hundred to four. The appointment records show four: met. Front-desk time on manual scheduling was to fall from ten hours a week to two. A time sample shows two: met. Staff overtime was to fall from four hundred hours a month to three hundred. But there are only three months of payroll data, taken before flu season. That's not yet visible. The average patient wait was to fall from forty-five minutes to thirty. The check-in log shows thirty-four. The share of planned improvement is forty-five minus thirty-four, over forty-five minus thirty: eleven over fifteen, about seventy-three percent. Partly met.
Quick Check
Measuring a Phone-Queue Improvement
Quick check. Willowbrook's phone-queue time was to fall from twelve minutes to four. The call log now shows six. What share of the planned improvement was achieved, and what's the status? Pause, and decide. Partly met, seventy-five percent. Twelve minus six is six minutes gained. Twelve minus four is eight planned. Six over eight is seventy-five. Fifty percent divides the gain by the starting twelve, not the planned eight. And met would round a shortfall up to success.
Intangible Benefits
Evidence for Benefits Hard to Count
Tangible benefits, like waiting times, error counts or overtime hours, are measured in records, against the starting value. Intangible ones, like confidence, cooperation or reputation, can't be counted directly. Their evidence is indirect: structured interviews, repeated ratings on the same questions, or behavior you can observe. Riverside's business case promised staff would trust the daily schedule. Interviews show most do, but two front-desk staff still keep a private paper backup. Partly met. Intangible evidence is weaker, and the review should say so. But leaving these benefits out because they're hard to measure would misrepresent the project's value.
Reporting Findings
Causes Rather Than Culprits
Report the findings as they are, including benefits not yet visible, and benefits not reached. Three habits help. Tie each statement to its evidence, so readers can check it. Report a benefit that can't yet be judged as exactly that, with the date it will be rechecked, rather than stretching it into a success, or dropping it. And explain a shortfall by what in the process, plan or design allowed it, not by who is at fault. A review that finds a culprit teaches people to hide problems. One that finds a cause teaches the organization something. Wording matters. The training didn't cover urgent walk-ins is a cause that can be fixed. The front desk ignored the system is a judgment that ends the conversation.
Feeding Back
Turning Findings Into Future Changes
Findings matter only if they change something. First, they go to the sponsor and the benefit owners, who can act on shortfalls, with extra training or adjustments. Second, to the project management office, which can spot patterns. If several projects miss the same kind of benefit, the cause may lie in how business cases are written, or benefits measured. Third, into future estimates. If training took twice as long as planned, the next training estimate changes. If a benefit was over-promised, the next one is justified differently.
Case Resolved
Why Waits Stayed at Thirty-Four Minutes
Back to Grace's satisfactory. Priya asks why the wait is thirty-four minutes, not thirty. Interviews show the front desk overrides the system's slots for urgent walk-ins, because training never covered how to enter them. Grace was pleased, and expected a thank-you note. Instead, Priya reports the wait as partly met, overtime as not yet visible, with a recheck after flu season, and the cause as a training gap, not the staff. Helen approves a short refresher course, and the project office adds urgent walk-ins to its training checklist for later projects. So the answer to the opening question: Riverside delivered most, not all, of its promise. A customer can honestly call a result satisfactory, while a benefit stays partly unrealized.
Key Takeaways
Evaluations and Reviews in Brief
To recap: customer satisfaction and realized benefits are different questions, asked at different times. Combine evaluation methods, and write specific, neutral, single-issue questions, rated and open. Name the response problems: return rate, courtesy bias, who answered, and small numbers. Months later, check each benefit against the business case: met, partly met, or not yet visible. And report causes, not culprits, so the findings feed the sponsor, the project office, and future estimates.
About Project Management at UPI Study
Project Management (Business 230) is a self-paced online course of 73 video lessons in 12 chapters, from starting and defining a project to planning, budgets, scheduling tools, proposals, contracts, execution, monitoring, closure, teams and certification. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.
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