The benefits or premortem

By Amos Beer, Amos Beer Ltd. T/A STRATAGILITY®

Many organisations have adopted projects postmortem – an analysis of what went well, what didn’t, what should go into standard procedures and what to avoid in the future.

This is an essential part of an ongoing learning culture. It has only one drawback – you can’t go back in time and fix things, so only future projects will benefit.

A better approach is to also precede each project with premortem: get the project team together after planning is finished and tell them “Imagine that the project has ended only partially successful/over budget/not in time/in complete failure. What could have been the reasons?”.

Brainstorm, list all the reasons, discuss them and try to find ways to mitigate the risks.

After completion, part of the postmortem will be comparison with the premortem. If you did your job well none of the premortem items will have had an effect on the project. The rest is for future projects.

Do you do premortem in your organisation?