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Instead of conducting a postmortem and looking back on what happened in your project you can try a pre-mortem just at the beginning of your project and imagine that it was an absolute failure! (alternatively think of success)
What you can expect to get out of this exercise
Creativity and openness from all team members to express their concerns in a safe environment when their project is still in the planning phase! Teams can get ideas and actions on areas that if implemented well could increase the chances of success!
How to do it
Creating the “script”
Before starting your pre-mortem, it is really important to illustrate an imaginary failed state, a disaster, of the project that is about to start. Adding details, using pictures and creating a “script” or a story could help the team to actually be part of this unwanted state! It can be, for example, an “aggressive” email that your team received from a customer’s CEO describing the frustration with the project delivery trigger and he needs your immediate support to resolve all these problems!
Why this has happened? – 30 minutes
After discussing this project imaginary failure story , all team members brainstorm possible causes that triggered this disaster!
How to prevent this imaginary failure? – 30 minutes
Discuss the themes and the identified causes. Ask team members to brainstorm and find possible solutions that will prevent the identified causes from happening in reality. The outcome should be a list of concrete actions that team members should take care of by themselves or delegate these to people who could best support them.
The team can decide to work on a few or all themes depending on the their availability, time and the importance of causes. The team can also follow-up on the actions or discuss more themes in their retrospectives at the end of each development cycle.
Keep Calm and carry on! – 5 minutes
You can close the pre-mortem with a relaxed message all participants! At the end, it was just a simulation and all participants gave their best to prevent this disaster from happening in real life! And the good thing is that you have a list of actions that might increase the chances of success! (in case this would really happen in the future)