What sort of questions should you be asking yourself once a project is done in order to carry through improvements?

Sales

What worked? What approach/material did you use to win the prospect, how long did it take to go from an initial enquiry to actual work and where did that customer find you or vice versa.

Conversion

Talking of converting that sale into actual work…what questions did they ask you before you bought? What information did they need? Is there a gap in your marketing material that could be filled?

Brief

Reflecting on the brief, did you actually address the core concern? Is the end product widely different from what you originally planned? what was it that changed the customers mind?

Quote vs Reality

How much time did you originally give this project and trying where possible to add up things like phone calls and emails, how long did it actually take? If this took much longer than expected, why was that? What unexpected costs might have arisen?

Communication

I think it’s useful to add up how many emails and phone calls a project actually took. How would you rate your level of interaction with the client? Were they chasing you or were you being proactive. If something went wrong how did you address that? Internally how was the project communicated between everyone? Was there a clear understanding of what needed to be done?

Deliverables

Did you deliver when you say you would? What held up any project deliverables? Do they meet the initial brief? Objectively how would you rate the quality against the time given?

Improvements

What have you learnt from this project? What could you have done differently? How could you have saved time/money/mis-communication? How could different members of your team work better together? What feedback have you had the client themselves?

All of these elements should be fed back into the process to improve your product/service over time.