How and Why You Should Run a Project Premortem Exercise

A post-mortem may be something you associate with the medical examiner’s office, but in business they’re some of the most beneficial meetings you’ll have. A post-mortem meeting will sum up the process, identify mistakes and create learning opportunities so those mistakes aren’t repeated in the next project.

The only problem with the post-mortem meeting is that it comes at the end of the project, which doesn’t help current projects. So why not try a meeting before the project starts?

What is a Premortem Exercise?

“Begin with the end in mind” – Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

Essentially, a project premortem is a hypothetical exercise where the team imagines the project has failed. That may sound like a negative note to start on, but the objective is to work backwards from that moment and discover what may have caused the project to break down. That way, plans can be put into place to try and prevent the issue cropping up.

Premortems are commonly used to start a full project, but when working agile it can be used at the beginning of every sprint, like how you would use an EasyRetro retrospective at the end of a sprint.

Premortem vs Post-mortem - What's the Difference?

It’s usually not a great sign if you’re ready to perform a post-mortem on your project. You can only undergo a post-mortem when a project has come to an unexpected end and you need to find out what went wrong and why it failed.

A premortem is a more positive affair, everything is still in the planning stages and no mistakes have been made yet. However, the risk factor after a premortem is drastically reduced as potential problems are flagged before they start impacting the project.

Why You Should Run a Premortem Exercise on Your Next Project

Mistakes cost money, that’s just a fact of life in the world of business. And yet, some companies spend surprisingly little time anticipating issues. Imagine heading into a new project armed with a list of potential issues and strategies to prevent or fix them. For the relatively small outlay of time and money spent on planning, you are potentially saving many painful hours and rising costs spent fixing problems after they occur.

Premortems are also a brilliant way of engaging the entire team. Your quieter team members may be nervous about bringing up a negative conversation. But they are thinking along the right lines, and often have the best ideas to avoid issues. Holding a project premortem gives them space to voice their concerns and their ideas to resolve them.

How to Run a Premortem Analysis with Your Team

Step 1: Introduce the situation

The first thing to do is ensure your entire team is up to speed on how the premortem works. The discussion is going to surround a hypothetical situation wherein the project has already failed. This is going to be a little confusing to some of your team so make sure to brief everyone on why you’ll be taking this route before development starts.

Step 2: Prepare

Premortems fit easily into an agile workflow as they use boards such as EasyRetro’s Problem, Root Cause, Solution template, or you can use a custom board if preferred. If running the meeting in-person you could also use a whiteboard with post-its and marker pens.

When you’ve picked the medium you’re going to use for the premortem, you need to set up columns and label them as follows:

• What could cause us to miss our deadline?
• What will keep our project on time?
• What does this project need that we don’t have?
• What do we already have that this project needs?
• What lessons have you learned from past projects?
• What are you worried about?
• What are you excited about?
• To discuss

Step 3: Brainstorm

To get started, the team needs to identify potential problems as well as things that have worked well in previous projects/sprints. Give your team a ten-minute slot to silently jot their answers down. Once the ideas are logged, organise them and match up similar ideas.

NB: EasyRetro has a great brainstorming tool to make this simple for your team, especially if you’re all working remotely.

Step 4: Identify Crucial Threats

Now you have a list of what could go wrong, it’s time to narrow down the topics for discussion.

Give each team member a set number of votes and tell them to choose the threats they feel most need addressing. For an in-depth discussion on how to manage team voting, check out our article on dot-voting.

Step 5: Identify Positive Items

Repeat step 4, but this time have the team vote on the positive items that have helped during previous projects and could prove advantageous during the next one.

Step 6: Discuss

You may have wondered what the “to discuss” column is for. This is where the top voted threats will end up and items in that column will be the topics for discussion.

The team will discuss each card and identify ways to solve the problems on the card, using the top voted positive items as inspiration.

Step 7: Recap

Wrap up the meeting by summing up what has been learned and assign team members to the task items that have been discussed.

Step 8: Action

It’s time to put your premortem exercise into action! Ensure all actions have an owner and a deadline, and get to work improving the odds that your next project will be signed off with a clean bill of health.

EasyRetro can enable better communication and collaboration at all stages of your premortem exercise, so grab yourself a free trial now.