Proactively find issues before they find you.

This is one of the most important responsibilities of a leader.

And that’s exactly what pre-mortems help with. 

Pre-mortems are great project risk management tools.

They help reduce hubris and overconfidence.

They are similar to ‘lesson learned’ or (agile) retrospectives – but better.

This is because they are done proactively giving the team the chance to avoid learning lessons the hard way.

Typically, when teams work on developing innovative products or expanding into new markets, they usually focus on the green route aka the ‘happy path’.

They discuss the thrilling launch, the possibility of capturing market share or the ways that people are likely to receive the new product or service.

Project teams rarely objectively and proactively consider potential risks.

Pre-mortems help project teams identify possible risks (and opportunities) so they can create more robust plans and processes. 

Here is a guide on how to implement them.

How to Run Pre-Mortems

1. What’s required: A meeting facilitator (typically the product or project manager), the project team, a (virtual) meeting room and a whiteboard or pen & paper.
2. Gather the entire project team.  It is important to have all or at least a key member of each stakeholder group (e.g. Business, Operations, Developers, QA etc) invited. This ensures you have diverse perspectives.
3. The meeting facilitator sets up two hypothetical scenarios. Scenario 1 – the project was a success; Scenario 2 – the project failed.
4. Scenario 1 (Success Case) – The meeting facilitator asks the team, “we are at the end of the project, and it was a success we delivered all requirements on time and within budget – what went well?”
5. The meeting facilitator captures the team’s responses for analysis. These responses are the project’s opportunities.
6. Scenario 2 (Failure Case) – The meeting facilitator asks the team, “we are at the end of the project, and we failed – what went wrong?”
7. The meeting facilitator captures the team’s response. These responses are the project’s potential threats and risks.
8. The project manager takes the identified opportunities and risks and works with the project team to prioritise them.
9. For each opportunity and risk, a response action plan should be developed. Risk responses would typically fall into 4 categories – 

• Avoid (remove the risk altogether by doing something else)
• Transfer (pass the liability to a third party e.g. taking out an insurance policy)
• Mitigate (reduce the probability and/or impact of the risk) or 
• Accept (residual risks to be monitored and tracked).

A quick word on ‘Risk Acceptance’: Even with the best risk management strategies, most projects would still have inherent residual risk. The action plan for these residual risks may be to simply accept them if they do happen. If these risks do happen, prior identification takes away some of the sting and surprise.

And that’s it! 

“If you do a pre-mortem right, you will not have to do an ugly post-mortem.

You might still do a post-mortem to learn, but odds are very high that it is not going to be a bad post-mortem.”

Shreyas Doshi

Pre-Mortems set up a team culture of collective project ownership.

They help the team recognise their shared responsibility to proactively call out factors that could put the project at risk.

For more best practices on implementing transformation programmes, check out: 7 Steps to Successfully Plan Business Expansion and Optimisation Projects

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