Corporate Finance

The Post-completion Review and Whether a Project Delivered What It Promised

Design the review that makes your next forecast better instead of merely more elaborate — what to measure, who should run it, when, and how to keep it from becoming a blame exercise that teaches everyone to write vaguer proposals.

  • Advanced
  • 13 min total
  • 14 chapters

What decision this helps you make: Which completed projects to review, against what baseline, by whom, and how to turn the accumulated record into a standing adjustment on future submissions rather than a filing cabinet nobody opens.

What this topic is

A post-completion review is a structured comparison, one or two years after a capital project is finished, between what the approved proposal promised and what actually happened — the cost, the timing, the volumes, the savings, the returns. It is the last step of the capital cycle and the one most companies have never run, which is why forecast quality in most organisations has not improved in a decade.

Why it matters

Without it, optimism is free. A sponsor whose numbers were never checked faces no cost for having been wrong, so the process reliably selects the most favourable estimate rather than the most accurate one. The review is the only mechanism that turns forecasting into a skill with feedback attached, and it is also the only way to find out whether your hurdle rate, your appraisal method, and your capital process are producing anything.

Who should learn it

Finance leaders who own the capital cycle, chief executives who suspect the numbers in board papers have never been tested, internal audit teams asked to add value beyond controls, and project sponsors who would like their next proposal to be believed.

What you will understand

  • Why the review exists to improve forecasts, not to allocate blame — and why that distinction is fragile
  • How to establish a baseline when the world has moved since approval
  • Which projects to review, when, and by whom
  • How to turn an accumulated record into a standing adjustment on future submissions

Prerequisites

Common misconception

"We would do post-completion reviews, but you can never really isolate the project's effect from everything else that happened." True, and it is not the objection it appears to be. The review is not trying to prove causation to a scientific standard — it is comparing a forecast against an outcome, and both of those are observable. If the proposal said the line would run at 240 units an hour and it runs at 190, that is a fact about the forecast regardless of what the market did. The attribution problem bites on the value created, not on the promises made, and the promises are where nearly all the learning is.