Murder Boards and Lessons Learned

I recently read about a Murder Board (or ‘Scrub Down’ if you are less upfront about it) and I was having a think about how you could implement this into a client services project, I am primarily in Network Services but it could be applied to any project.

Taken from the wikipedia reference

“A murder board, also known as a “scrub-down”, is a committee of questioners set up to critically review a proposal and/or help someone prepare for a difficult oral examination.”

Why They Would Work

1. Would allow for continual learning by all parties — Lessons Learned is a large part of what I emphasize on as a Project Manager. Gathering the lessons experienced, collecting organizational artifacts and then making sure they are utilized and reviewed appropriately (not just when a project is closed, but continually). With a Murder Board at set interval we could get some real Lessons Learned from the project, as a portfolio manager I would implement this once a month and invite the stakeholders to participate (in a client services industry this would be sales, operations and engineering) I would then expand this to customers allowing a customer to tear apart our project (although this would be planned and be very slowly introduced or considered).

2. Would break down Ego’s — While working for IT companies (although this would definitely translate to all industries) I find that pack mentality starts to come into play, during junior years people are sponges wanting to learn about the industry and learn information in general. As people get further into their careers and are promoted they lose the ability to learn the same way, Ego’s come into play. Having a murder board where everyone had to check their emotions at the door would be a great thing for those with the biggest ego’s as they would have to self reflect and take on board that they may not be as amazing as they thought but again it would allow them to improve.

3. Allow striving for perfection — I recently read a story (whether true or not is beside the point) where Steve Jobs dropped a prototype iphone in an aquarium and when bubbles came out of the device he said ‘see there is still space in there, I don’t want any space’ or words to that effect. That is the idea of a murder board taken to the extreme, what allowed that engineer to compromise in the design? I primarily believe it was because no one pushed them to the edge of perfection and close enough was good enough. Due to the nature of our society now we are all treated as if we are perfect special highly intelligent snowflakes. Sorry to say we aren’t.

Potential Problems

1. Mediation of meeting — I see this as one of the key problems, if you don’t have a strong set of rules and strong personality mediating the meeting, it could get out of hand. We have all seen politicians fight (see video below) when people feel attacked even highly intelligent, normally placid people can lose their mind. With a very strong set of rules (i.e. no personal comments, no deviations outside the current project, one person speaking at a time, no swearing and when the mediator speaks everyone is quiet) I think this could be mitigated.

1. The fragility of people in a workplace— People can often surprise how fragile they actually are to criticism. If the comments are critical about work, they are all made so we can improve! I have read too many articles where people feel their identity is being attacked, but if you are working for a profit based company, especially a public one, the company is more important than you being unable to take some criticism of your work so we can improve as a company. It would also be set out very clearly that this murder board would in no way have any linkage to performance reviews or re-numeration, it was purely for the project and organization to grow and not make mistakes.
2. Big personalities v Little personalities — This could quite easily become the big personalities in the room commandeering the questions and answers, not allowing the more placid people time to participate in the tear-down. To combat this I would ask all people to prepare at least 1 question and work the way through the room before opening it up to the floor, again this would come back to good mediation and agenda setting in the meeting.

Lets All Work Together

I like the idea of murder boards, whether something similar could be setup in an organization would depend on the leadership team and its direction for the company (I also dont think this would work with fluffy organizations or very small teams). You would need complete buy-in from all aspects of the organization but I could see some serious tangible benefits for the organization from increased visibility, team collaboration, continual improvement and most importantly less mistakes on projects.