The post mortem paradox: a Delphi study of IT specialist perceptions

Abstract

While post mortem evaluation (PME) has long been advocated as a means of improving development practices by learning from IT project failures, few organizations conduct PMEs. The purpose of the study is to explain this discrepancy between theory and practice. This paper integrates findings from a Delphi study of what experienced practitioners perceive as the most important barriers to conducting PMEs with insights from organizational learning theory. The results suggest that there are critical tensions between development practices and learning contexts in many organizations, and adopting PMEs in these cases is likely to reinforce organizational learning dysfunctions rather than improve current development practices. Based on these findings, we argue that the PME literature has underestimated the limits to learning in most IT organizations and we propose to explore paradoxical thinking to help researchers frame continued inquiry into PME and to help managers overcome learning dysfunctions as they push for more widespread use of PMEs.

Keywords:

• PME
• organizational learning
• paradoxical thinking
• Delphi study
• post mortem paradox