What is a Pre-Mortem?
Courtesy Matt Byrom
In conventional project management, when you undertake a risk assessment, people are asked to say what might go wrong.
A pre-mortem is fundamentally different – it is like a project post-mortem, but done in advance. People are asked to project their thinking into the future, to a point where the project or service has definitely failed, to define what that failure may look like, and then to generate plausible reasons for that failure.
By making the eventuality of failure concrete – ‘we have failed’ – rather than merely a possibility, it subtly alters the way we think about it. It enables us to come up with more credible reasons for what could go wrong and that enables us to improve the project itself. It enables us to build learning from failure into the implementation process itself.
The steps to a pre-mortem are as follows:
- Outline the planned project
- Imagine and then describe the future failure
- List the reasons for failure
- Identify the priority reasons
- Agree the actions to mitigate those priority reasons
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