The Art of the Pre-Mortem
“Okay, let’s get together and spend half an hour to an hour talking about some of the things that worked and some of the things that could have been done better.”
How many notes similar to that one have you gotten towards the end of a project? How many of those projects were tumultuous, aggravating, disorganized, and chaotic? How many were finished on time?
Even better — how many times have you actually sat down and had the post mortem?
If you’ve been on teams like I have, the post mortem notes come in somnolent tones, dripping with exhaustion and ‘I’m too tired for this shit.’-ness. I won’t sit here and proselytize about whether it’s right or not to have a post mortem in the first place. If you have clear, avoidable issues coming up in your projects, you probably need to sit down and discuss them. Sometimes a simple change to process or project management can fix irritations in your project lifecycles.
But, a lot of times, the post mortem is the first place you look for problems.
THIS SHIT IS IDIOTIC
That’s like doctors doing all of their diagnoses on cadavers. It’s too f*cking late! The lady’s dead! Quit poking at her corpse and start thinking about how you’re going to prevent the next death. When you figure out ‘Oh, this lady drank 6 glasses of wine every night before bed, her liver actually clawed through her back and escaped,’ you realize that maybe something could have been done if you’d only asked her about it.
Just like preventative medicine on human beings, we need to start thinking about problems before they have the power to kill. Or severely injure. Or highly irritate.
All we have to do is ask
Your team wants to succeed. You want to succeed. No one wants to sit in a meeting after a project and feel like shit about how it went. No one likes passing the buck or assigning blame or worse: getting assigned the blame. If you think about it, most of the things we see go wrong with projects could have easily been mitigated, if only we had spent the time to think about them first.
Say hello to the Pre Mortem. It’s an exercise that can be completed with your whole team in under an hour. Get your people in a room, give them a pen and a piece of paper, and ask them to spend 90 seconds making an ad hoc list of things they can see going wrong in the project.
Take everyone’s list and go to the whiteboard. Start writing them out. If you have duplicates, put a check next to that one and move on. When that’s done, you have your list of concerns. Take a good hard look at that list. Does that look like some of the common themes in your Post Mortems? I’ll bet it does. I’ll bet if you assign ownership for these things to people sitting in that room, your next Post Mortem will be more of a Office Fiesta, maybe even with a piñata. Or margaritas.
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