Post-mortem of Pre-mortem!
I came across the unique and effective concept of Pre-mortem - this is proactive approach for post-mortem. Gary Klein (research psychologist and Fellow of the American Psychological Association) introduced the Pre-mortem method of Risk assessment in 2007. Since then, it has been used widely across business and management practices.
What is Pre-mortem?
As we are familiar with Post-mortem term, which came from the medical practice, where doctors identify the reason of person's death- and if you think of it - everyone benefits from post-mortem including family and doctors- except the patient. Pre-mortem is basically hypothetical opposite of Post-mortem- where we assume that "patient" has died and we try to find the possible reasons of "patient's" death. And this is where the benefit of pre-mortem lies. Pre-mortem happens at the beginning of the Project rather than the end, so the project success chance can be improved by mitigating the possible risks.
Hindsight Bias overcomes Fallacy Bias
Pre-mortem takes advantage of people's "Hindsight Bias" - tendency of people to know things better afterwards and explain the past events better than future events. Pre-mortem uses "Hindsight bias" to overcome Fallacy bias - tendency to underestimate the time, resource and budget to complete the project - which leads to poor planning for potential risk and mitigation planning.
Tiger- Paper Tiger-Elephant
We do the pre-mortem pretty early in the lifecycle when team is briefed about the plan- and team should include all the relevant stakeholder. Product Leader/Project Leader informs the team that "Imagine the Project/initiative has failed miserably and now write down the reasons of this failure". Please note the difference that the leader does not say that what could cause the project to fail- but they are prompting to imagine the project has already failed, and now we are working backwards ie doing post-mortem of failure.
Product leader Shreyas Doshi provided an interesting way to list and categorize the risks which provides common vocabulary for the team to use throughout the project lifecycle
- ?? Tiger - A clear threat that will kill us if we don’t do something about it.( like a Tiger would)
- ?? Paper Tiger - An ostensible threat that you are personally not worried about (but others might be).
- ?? Elephant - The thing that you’re concerned the team is not talking . ( An elephant in the room)
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All threats are recorded, voted by stakeholder and then leader prioritize the list and make the action plan against all these threats.
Why Pre-mortem?
Pre-mortem set up provides the psychological safety to team members to provide the potential risk items, which otherwise they will not share in normal set up.
It also makes the team member feel valued as they are sharing the risks which probably other team members are not able to see.
This exercise also enables the team to pick up the early signs of trouble once the project is underway.
And most importantly- if you do the Pre-mortem rightly, you probably do not have to do painful Post-mortem. And it may help to keep the "Patient" alive as well !
Reference:
This is an insightful approach to proactive problem-solving. How has the implementation of pre-mortem techniques impacted your product lifecycle management so far? It would be interesting to hear about specific success stories or challenges encountered during this process.