Premortem for project delivery success
The old Waterfall methods of project implementation are less able to cope with a dynamic and changing landscape. The approach to front-end a project with planning, scoping, preparation, and documentation are often at the expense of taking the lessons learnt about previous failures – from project postmortems. There is huge value in post-mortem analysis of a failed (or even ‘less effective’) project delivery, but these lessons are often not taken back to the project planners, and the errors are repeated again. In a quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results”. A potential technique could be to do a premortem for project delivery success.
The PreMortem for project delivery success
Taking a more Agile approach will ensure that the early stages includes project delivery, the business and project planning to all work closer together. Performing a pre-mortem analysis, aligned to lessons learnt from previous projects, will ensure that the focus is on avoiding the problems before they occur. This has the following important impacts;
- Team members are more likely to report signs of trouble during project delivery – they are looking out for trouble, because it is on the agenda.
- Reservations and concerns have a forum for being raised – without the fear of “going against the grain”.
- Implicit assumptions can be teased out – less chance of “this is the way things are done here” holding back the project.
- Known Unknowns can be identified, categorised and prioritised. Knowing what problems might happen can ensure they are given adequate time and focus.
Premortem techniques
It goes without saying that a premortem should be inclusive – not just the people planning the project, writing charters or raising the business case for funding. By including people who would be included in the delivery, they can be more aware of other issues and influences that they may not otherwise have visibility of.
Start with the statement;
This project is about to start – how will it fail?
discuss the problems and impacts, and then end with
This project is now planned for success – let’s do it!
