As someone who thinks and writes about retrospectives, I sometimes find myself musing on the other half of the bookend...what about at the beginning of things? I think about chartering projects, and project kickoffs and iteration/release planning activities. How can we use what we've learned in our retrospectives to get the next project or increment of work off to the best start.
Today I saw a post on the Open Space mailing list that pointed me to the Anecdote blog from a group in Australia. Shawn writes about Pre-Mortems. It's an unfortunate name ("before death"), but the intent made sense. It comes from a book by Gary Klein.
Pre-Mortems provide a six-step way for groups to think together, tapping into the intuition of everyone on the team to anticipate risks and impediments. The short version of the six steps are:
- Prepare - have materials ready, understand the plan for the project, and sit somewhere comfortable.
- Imagine a fiasco - Engage team members in lively imaginings of impending doom and failure.
- Generate the reasons for failure - Each person on the team writes down their ideas about the sources of failure. The different perspectives of team members provide the benefit of fuller coverage.
- Consolidate the lists - Use a round robin call-out to capture all the discrete reasons and write the on the whiteboard.
- Revisit the plan - Look for ways this foreknowledge (or fore-guessing, at least) might lead to adjustments.
- Periodically review the list - Keeps the list fresh and top of mind, and let's the team evaluate and improve their powers of anticipation.
Using a Pre-mortem (let's find a better name) gives the team a "realism" test before beginning the project. No project is perfect. It could help to have advance knowledge of obstacles, risks and impediments.