The Wow Project

If you're a great PWPL, you've already been sizing up your next opportunity. You've already identified and recruited most of your team -- you want to make sure that you get the people you want, not the people the human-resources department wants to give you. And, if you've been practicing the Richard Branson-Karl Weick style of observation, you've been assembling your own notebook-and-filing-cabinet collection of newspaper clippings, personal experiences, and random thoughts. All of that is raw material: It's just waiting for you to sift through it and to pick one thing to turn into your next Wow Project.

But most important, the end of the project marks your biggest opportunity: the chance for you to do a self-evaluation. Calling the project a "success" doesn't begin to capture the real value of the experience. If you're intent on making it an intensely personal success, you need to spend some time reflecting on what the project has meant to you. What did you learn from it? What were you good at? What were you less good at? What skills did you feel yourself developing? What skills do you still need to develop? As you do your own project postmortem, you're not only closing the emotional and professional books on your last project, but you're also opening the first chapter of your next project.

From this self-evaluation will come the answers that will guide you forward.