Why You Need to Conduct a Premortem

As a business owner, at the end of each major project, we performed a postmortem to determine what we did right and what we did wrong so we could learn from each experience and avoid similar failures or friction points in future projects. While postmortems are about reviewing past projects to find takeaways to do better in the future, the premortem is conducted as an exercise before the project kicks off.

A premortem asks the following question: what elements could lead to the failure of the project? And if we encounter a problem, what would be the likely causes of that problem or failure? A premortem is an exercise designed to anticipate the challenges of a new opportunity to address issues around opportunity costs and overcome our confirmation bias.

The value of conducting a premortem is that people generally tend to avoid conflict and want to appear supportive, so they often say things to be polite or keep their mouths shut even though they may have some reservations. Too many people are reluctant to speak up about their reservations during typical planning meetings. By creating a situation in which dissenters, who are knowledgeable about the undertaking and concerned about its weaknesses, can safely speak up, you can improve a project’s chances of success.

The technique breaks possible group thinking by actively facilitating a positive discussion about the potential problems, thereby increasing the likelihood that catastrophic problems are identified at an early stage. The premortem process encourages people to provide genuine feedback to give their take on what might go wrong with the project.

By framing it as an exercise, you remove the personal component, forcing stakeholders to imagine and share even the remotest of potential problems or challenges that might occur. Stakeholders are incentivized to be more objective and completely honest in their feedback at a premortem meeting.

A premortem is like a mystery where the team is trying to anticipate potential problems and challenges and determine their possible cause. During the premortem, the team can come up with possible ways to spot the potential causes before the problem becomes critical and develop a contingency plan to address it if it rears its ugly head.

Businesses that perform a premortem can reduce the chances of failure due to biases such as overconfidence and planning fallacy by analyzing the scale and likelihood of each problem and taking preventive actions to avoid the untimely failure of the project.

The premortem analysis seeks to identify problems and challenges via the hypothetical presumption of near-future failure.

According to Julie Martins, there are six steps for a premortem:

Create a project plan – A project plan is a blueprint of the key elements the project team will accomplish during the project. The entire team needs to understand exactly what the project plan is to think about how it could go wrong. Depending on the complexity of the effort, you could also share the 13-step client onboarding plan that you hopefully developed.
Invite related stakeholders – Invite anyone who might have insight into why the project could fail. You can always develop a RASCI chart to help identify the stakeholders to invite.
Brainstorm potential project failures – All the stakeholders should sit down before the premortem and come up with a list of potential problems and challenges on their own. Some common problems and challenges could be related to the addition of unplanned efforts associated with scope creep, scheduling delays, security breaches, communication issues, etc.
Share risks – This is the step where you actually perform the premortem meeting. Once all the stakeholders have brainstormed their list of things that could go wrong, they all come together as a group to share and compile a complete list of potential problems and challenges. It is recommended that you go around the room and have each stakeholder share one item at a time. This way, everyone gets a chance to speak. When the lists are completed, group and merge similar ideas to create a master list of potential problems and challenges.
Identify items with high likelihood or severity – While all the problems and challenges listed by the team are possible, many are not very probable. In this step, take all the identified problems and challenges and place them into a risk assessment matrix to create a visible representation of the level of risk by considering the probability or likelihood of an event versus the severity of the consequences to the project should it occur.
Review and revise the project plan – Take the risk matrix you produced and revise your project plan by looking for weak points that you can strengthen to prevent some of the failure scenarios the stakeholders identified.