Finally, PAR-4 is a project postmortem, which takes place about six months after the product becomes available for shipment. In this phase, people involved with the project answer questions regarding such items as how closely actual costs correlated with those in the budget. The information goes into an Oracle relational database that enables anyone working on future projects to benefit from the experiences. In the past, engineers and managers had to rely on anecdotes or institutional memory, which sometimes were unavailable or inaccurate. As a result, a firm commitment is given to do that phase only.
Money is hard-allocated for each subsequent phase only after approval.
However, right from the start, funds for the entire project are held in reserve in a theoretical pool, or soft-allocated. By soft-allocating funds, we ensure that if they do become viable the capital and manpower will be there. If the project is not approved, the soft-allocated money gets freed up and becomes available for other projects. One relatively uncommon aspect of the re-engineered approval process is that when the given PAR phase is approved, all funds required to perform that phase are under the complete control of the project manager. Traditionally, when it came time for a capital investment, the project manager had to obtain the same 10 to 12 signatures that had been needed to get approval for the project in the first place.