The Pre-Mortem is a technique that is best completed early on in a project, it is even worth considering doing as the very first exercise you do since it can lead to completely unexpected scenarios being caught well before they have a chance to happen. This may well be a technique your Product Manager is already familiar with in which case you may be facilitating rather than driving the topic, regardless this is a technique worth having in your own personal toolkit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you work later on in the delivery cycle such as at the Feature or User Story stage this technique can still prove effective when embarking on a whole new concept to you project; for example, you\u2019ve build a whole platform but now want to introduce Single Sign-On (SSO). Before starting work on the requirements gathering for the Feature, you can try out a Pre-Mortem exercise focussed on the implementation of SSO. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Running a\u00a0Pre-Mortem\u00a0workshop\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Pre-Mortem can be completed reasonably quickly but keep in mind, if you are going to do one, it\u2019s worth actually doing it properly, just because it\u2019s quick doesn\u2019t mean you can skip through it without thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Goal of the workshop\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n To identify as many risks as possible before kicking off the project and have as many mitigations to those risks as possible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Time<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 Hour to 1 \u00bd hour <\/p>\n\n\n\n Who to invite\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is going to be tricky but try to get a range of attendees from: <\/p>\n\n\n\n How many to invite\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Somewhere between 4 and 12 attendees <\/p>\n\n\n\n Required Equipment\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Either a whiteboard\/Post-it combination or an online whiteboard tool such as Mural <\/p>\n\n\n\n Agenda<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n * If there are more than 8 people in the session, split into two groups for Part 2 and 3. Group A will be answering the question \u2018Why was the project a success?\u2019 while Group B will be answering the question \u2019 Why did the project fail?\u2019 for Part 2 and then swap the groups over for Part 3. If you have fewer than 8 people don\u2019t worry about splitting the group just follow the Agenda as provided. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Introduction<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the start of the session you will need to set the scene; it is 6 weeks after the launch of the Minimum Viable Product (or whichever key date you are choosing to do the Pre-Mortem on). Now each participant needs to look back on how the project has run and imagine what was successful and what was a failure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Why was the Project a success?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this part the participants of the session will need to imagine everything that has gone right, maybe the MVP received praise from the customers, maybe it was ready for delivery early, it could be anything but try to keep the exercise grounded in reality (so comparisons to other recent projects at your company are a good idea). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Why did the project fail?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now we move onto the part that many people take to quite naturally. It\u2019s time to facilitate the group through thinking of everything that went wrong enroute to the MVP. Again try to keep it grounded in reality (it is doubtful that Godzilla was the reason you failed) but in this section, quantity is desirable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Brainstorm the Project success\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now take the whole group and run through the ideas from the Project success part and facilitate an ideas session of what actions can be taken to ensure that the predicted success does actually happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Brainstorm the Project failure\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Now to brainstorm a mitigation for every single note on \u2018Why did the project fail?\u2019. For some of the notes there could potentially be multiple mitigations. Should you run into something that you can\u2019t come up with a single strategy to mitigate, then it is essential to note it as a risk (and if possible return to ideation on how to mitigate every few months). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wrap up and Next actions\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At this stage you can provide a quick recap of what has been done, highlight any key points that came out of the session that have maybe been a bit of a surprise and also allocate Next actions where anything stands out as immediately obvious (maybe the Product Manager needs to be creating a Roadmap and sharing it as soon as possible). <\/p>\n\n\n\n After the workshop\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As with any workshop output, make sure it is noted down and made available to every new joiner to the project. As time goes by and more experience is gained and lessons learnt it is worth revisiting the outputs of this exercise for further insights and mitigation strategies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Technique Summary<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this chapter we looked at the benefits of performing a Pre-Mortem. Once we established the case for doing a Pre-Mortem we then went through the exercise of running a Pre-Mortem workshop with variations to accommodate smaller project teams. Lastly was the customary reminder to share the results of the exercise plus a note of repeating the exercise every now and then as the team gains experience. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Pre-Mortem is a technique that is best completed early on in a project, it is even worth considering doing as the very first exercise you do since it can lead to completely unexpected scenarios being caught well before they have a chance to happen. This may well be a technique your Product Manager is already familiar with in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-techniques"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dantheba.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n