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A “premortem” is a project planning strategy in which a team will be asked to imagine that the project they’re about to start working on has failed, in order to identify potential issues that may affect success and ensure they’re prepared for them in advance. Being able to run a successful premortem session is a useful project management skill to have in 2024, because it sets a self-reflective tone for any ensuing project and ensures you’ll be prepared if things do go wrong.
The data suggests that implementing these kinds of pre-project strategies is key to successful project management; around 65% of workplace projects end up failing, so it’s important you’re doing everything you can to identify potential problems early on.
Along with providing an in-depth definition of a project premortem, in this guide, we’ll cover:
What Is a Project Premortem?
Before we get into how to run one, here’s a full project premortem definition: A project premortem is a planning exercise that is run before a project starts to help anticipate and address any potential setbacks. In a premortem, team members will be required to speculate on what could go wrong during their project and improve it ahead of time, instead of waiting for errors or mistakes to occur. A successful premortem will pinpoint all the high-impact risks and take steps to mitigate them, so the project runs as smoothly as it can, once started.
Although applied in a very different context, the word premortem roughly functions as an antonym for “postmortem”, the process of examining a corpse to determine the true cause of death. Project postmortems are also a common fixture of contemporary project management.
A standard premortem will help you prepare for the worst; a particularly thorough one may drastically change the scope of your project.
A typical premortem meeting will involve everyone working on your project coming together to identify obstacles, issues, and challenges they may encounter, so fewer rash, off-the-cuff decisions will have to be made further down the line.
Naturally, premortems can have frustrating results, especially if they send you back to the drawing board – but it’s better than having your project become one of the 65% that fail because key risks weren’t assessed beforehand.
1. Create a project plan
Before you can assess how a project might go wrong in a premortem, you need to set out what your project will look like if everything goes to plan, so you know what to aim for.
Key aspects of project planning include coming up with project goals, identifying your team’s success metrics, creating a task-by-task timeline, setting a budget, allocating resources, delegating tasks, and collecting any data you’ll need for your work.
There are other tips to follow to ensure your project is successful, but getting the core elements mentioned above right is the most crucial thing.
2. Assemble all participants of the project
The specific individuals you invite to your premortem meeting/s will shape the ideation process.
Ideally, everyone working on the project should attend, including the project manager or scrum master, as well as any external stakeholders who have a vested interest in making sure the project succeeds.
The more hands on deck, the more likely you are to identify the problems that may arise further down the line.
If your project is large and involves a lot of people, you may want to run multiple premortem sessions.
It may also be a good idea to run this strategy in smaller groups if you think staff members or teams will be more honest about possible roadblocks, or if you’re working on a project with multiple, specialized teams that may benefit from having more time to articulate their concerns.
3. Brainstorm what could go wrong with the project
Now we’re into the real meat of the premortem, which involves asking your team to imagine that your project has failed. Useful questions you could ask to get their cogs whirring include:
- What’s the main reason our project might fail?
- What would need to go wrong to cause this failure?
- What’s the biggest challenge currently facing our project?
- Is there anything that might cause our deadline to be pushed back?
- Why might we miss our project deadline?
- What results would the project stakeholders consider unsatisfactory?
- What obstacles will prevent us from succeeding?
- What went wrong on previous projects you’ve worked on?
- Will our current resources be sufficient for completing our project?
Asking your members of the team to think about both project-wide problems that may arise and problems they may encounter with their individual workflows specifically, is advised.
It’s worth remembering that project management tools like ClickUp and monday.com now offer online whiteboards that you can use to easily collate the risks identified by your team in your premortem. You can find out more about these providers in our in-depth ClickUp review and monday.com review.
You’ll find tools like this especially useful if you have remote workers on your team, or if you’d like a central location to manage all the ensuing stages of your project and facilitate better collaboration throughout.
4. Collate similar failure themes
After you’ve identified all of the different things you think could go wrong, you can start looking for patterns in what your team is suggesting. If there’s an obvious, serious risk that is mentioned by multiple members of your team, pay close attention to it.
Although some themes will shine through as priority considerations, it’s vital that you keep track of everything that’s mentioned in your premortem meeting.
“Aim to have one or two people take copious notes,” Brad Anderson, Executive Director of Fruition, recommends to any project manager performing a premortem.
“There will be some very serious dangers highlighted in the premortem, but it will all be for naught if they are forgotten after the conference is over. The project manager should go over the notes afterward to ensure that every issue was considered and, if it made the cut, that a concrete action plan was developed and assigned to a team member.”
5. Pinpoint and prioritize addressing high-impact risks
It’s all well and good coming up with every possible way that things may go wrong during your project, but you must organize these risks clearly so you can focus your efforts on addressing the ones that are most likely to affect the success of your project.
Pinpointing the risks that are most likely to have a wide-reaching and negative impact on your project will be integral to deciding where you should direct your mitigative resources.
If this part of the premortem isn’t carried out, you’ll invest time and money that could have been spent elsewhere into preventing low-impact risks.
6. Formulate plans to prevent failure
The final step of the premortem process is creating plans that will be implemented should the risks to your project arise as predicted.
This part of the process doesn’t have to be confined to the one premortem meeting and may demand secondary discussions to iron out your strategies for worst-case scenarios.
Planning resources should be directed, first and foremost, towards preventing the highest-impact risks you identified in the previous step.
There’s really no downside to performing a premortem; it’ll only make your team better equipped to handle difficult challenges throughout your project. Here, we’ll take a closer look at some of the core benefits of performing a postmortem:
- You’ll make fewer rash decisions
- You’ll spot problems earlier
- You’ll create a shared understanding of your project
- Your team will be more honest with you
- Your team will feel valued and involved
You’ll make fewer rash decisions
Almost all projects change as they progress, and stumbling blocks can come out of nowhere – but quick, reactive decisions made on the fly can be fraught with risk.
Premortems reduce the number of problems you’ll have to react to without a pre-made plan already in place.
“I love using premortems because they help you set out an agreed course of action should something not go to plan,” says MVF’s Senior Product Manager Tim Kitching, who regularly performs premortems before projects commence.
“I recently used one ahead of a product launch and the launch ended up resulting in a negative impact for one of our key success metrics,” he continued. “But we’d already set out a plan for that eventuality in the premortem, so we were able to calmly follow those steps, rather than making rash decisions in the heat of the moment.”
You’ll spot problems earlier
If you’ve discussed a possible problem you may encounter on your project with your entire team, and that problem actually arises once the project is underway, it’s likely you’ll spot it earlier than if you hadn’t talked about it.
Performing a robust premortem will make everyone working on your project acutely aware of the possible precursors to whatever problems you may encounter. This will allow you to nip issues in the bud, respond to them quicker, or better manage their impact if it’s unavoidable.
In almost all cases, problems you face during projects will be noticed sooner, responded to more quickly, and dealt with more competently if previously discussed in a premortem.
In some extreme cases, a premortem may illustrate that a given project has too many risks to even be worth completing.
“During the premortem for a finance company I was working for, we uncovered a use case scenario that could have had massive repercussions for the future of our business due to a potentially catastrophic investment,” explains Aurelie Beiehler, CEO of Memoria.
“In fact, this premortem was so dire that we decided to gut the project and move on.”
But therein lies the beauty – and utility – of the premortem; as the project isn’t even underway it’s a lot less painful to make the big, but ultimately correct, decision to scrap it.
You’ll create a shared understanding of your project
Project premortems will give team members valuable insights into the potential roadblocks that their colleagues may face.
This will go some way to help employees manage their expectations of one another, and the discussion of challenges will lead to more empathy further down the line if things don’t quite go to plan.
A premortem may also uncover areas where sub-teams and individuals can collaborate to ensure challenges that affect more than one functional area of your project are dealt with.
Your team will be more honest with you
Premortems will give everyone working on your project a safe space to air their issues before anyone has invested time, energy, and resources into various aspects of your project.
Not every employee may feel comfortable voicing their concerns about a problem they’ve identified once a project is underway and other team members believe they are on the right course, particularly if the staff member is junior or new to the team.
“One thing I’ve learned through the premortem process is that teams can benefit from an environment that fosters open communication and encourages everyone to contribute” Dustin Ray, Chief Growth Officer and Co-CEO of IncFile, told Tech.co.
“The premortem process can be used to break down communication barriers and encourage participation from all team members” he added.
Your team will feel valued and involved
A project premortem presents an easy way to show your entire team that their opinions on project matters are important to you.
What’s more, kicking off with an honest discussion about what might go wrong is a great way to set the tone of your entire project, and signal to your team that you’re open to constructive criticism that can help improve your work.
A project premortem may give you some indication of who may be best placed to troubleshoot specific issues identified as possible risks and will give your team members a chance to fairly divide responsibility for implementing premortem plans in different scenarios.
How Businesses Use Premortems: Tips and Tricks
In 2024, lots of businesses are using premortems to ensure that they’re properly prepared for all eventualities that a project may entail – and discovering issues they may never have identified without them. Here are some tips and tricks from those who’ve been through it.
Check yourself before you wreck yourself
Many business decision makers that spoke to Tech.co said they utilize premortems to ensure they’re viewing their project in a truly objective, critical fashion.
“Since a premortem assumes the project has already failed, it frees you to come up with ideas without your inflated sense of self-confidence clouding your judgment” Sean Stevens, Director of ImmerseEducation, explains.
A premortem will give you the opportunity to critically assess presumptions you may hold, regarding the ease of the project being completed.
“During one project premortem, we discovered that our client’s website had several technical issues that could negatively impact our SEO efforts,” Maria Harutyunyan, Co-founder and head of SEO at Loopex Digital, recalls.
“We had assumed that the website was in good shape since it had recently been redesigned, but after conducting the premortem, we realized that several critical technical issues needed to be addressed before we could effectively optimize the site.”
Consider all potential risk causes
“Through the premortem process, I have learned many things that I wouldn’t have learned without conducting it” explains Athina Zisi, Chief Operations Officer of Energy Casino.
“In one project premortem, we identified a potential risk related to a new payment processor that we were planning to integrate into our online casino platform. By imagining that the payment processor had failed, we were able to identify a key potential root cause of the failure, which was a lack of communication between our development team and the payment processor’s technical support team.
She continued, “we were then able to take proactive measures to ensure that communication channels were established and that everyone was on the same page when it came to the integration process.”
Don’t rush your premortem
It’s vital to put aside enough time to run a far-reaching premortem, or you may risk missing glaring problems.
“A chat lasting only 20 minutes will not do,” Joe Troyer, CEO & Head of Growth of DigitalTriggers, told Tech.co. “It is recommended that you set aside at least one to two hours to discuss the issues and possible solutions.”
“If you think that’s too long, think of all the time you’ll waste if your project fails,” he added.
Use premortems pragmatically
Although premortems are important, you don’t necessarily need to perform them for every single project you’re working on – especially if you don’t have much time on your hands.
“While I recommend conducting a premortem for most projects, it may not be necessary for every project” suggests Rajan Ad, CEO of Magical Media Studio.
“For smaller projects with well-defined scopes and low risk, a premortem may not be necessary. However, for larger, more complex projects with higher risk, a premortem can be an invaluable tool to identify potential issues and mitigate risk.”
Using Project Management Software for Premortems
Now you’re clued up on everything you need to know about project premortems, you’re fully equipped to run one before your next project.
Before you start, however, we’d recommend checking out some project management software tools capable of providing support along the way, from the premortem to implementing a MOCHA framework and completing the closing stages of your project.
As we mentioned in the introduction, ClickUp’s online whiteboard will be helpful in your premortem meeting, particularly if you have remote employees dialing in from around the world. Other providers, like monday.com, also have collaborative features like this.
Granted, you don’t necessarily need to use project management software to conduct premortems – or manage projects for that matter – but dedicated features for planning out and monitoring workflows in cloud project management software solutions mean they’re a lot more useful than your standard spreadsheet or rudimentary task-tracking tool.
Features like Gantt charts and Kanban boards will bring clarity to your task management, while intuitive form builders, provided by the likes of Smartsheet, will help you compile feedback that can be used to sculpt your project postmortem.
Whether you rope in some software to help you out or not, premortems are always the first piece to the project management puzzle you should be putting down – and in the long run, it’s going to save you a lot of time, money, and company resources.
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