End of project reflection
I recently completed a project working with the Science Museum Group to facilitate and capture staff feedback and reflections on their group-wide learning projects. This fed into a best practice guide and toolkit for the Group's four museums to use in the future. It was a fascinating project, and fantastic to see time being set aside for reflection and staff contributions being sought, valued and used. It got me thinking about my own reflection and project evaluation when client projects come to an end. Whilst I always look back on them and think about them, this has never been a formalised or written-down process. So I decided to create a simple reflection sheet that I now use at the end of each project, which:
enables me to reflect in a more structured, constructive and consistent way;
identifies lessons for future work to help me improve what I do, how I work, and mitigate similar future issues;
ultimately feeds into business planning work, continually helping me to identify my strengths and preferences in terms of types of work and how I work.
If anyone is interested in having a look or using the sheet, you are welcome to download it as a Word or PDF document and I'd be really interested to hear what methods other freelancers and consultants use.