Pre-mortem
A collaborative exercise for the entire team to identify and talk through potential project risks. Ideally, this is done toward the end of the project kickoff, so folks have enough context to participate in the brainstorm.
Outcome
Top risks are identified, discussed, and mitigation strategies put in place for each.
Method
- Pose the following scenario to the team: “Imagine you’re presenting to leadership 12 months from now and must explain why this project completely failed.”
- Give the team 5 minutes to come up with reasons the project might’ve failed – one idea per post-it. Don’t limit yourselves. All reasons are valid.
- Rotating through the team, have each person read 5-10 post-its out loud.
- Take 5 minutes to affinity map the post-its and give a title to each group.
- Do a team vote on the group. This could go a couple ways:
- You can vote on which groups are most likely to happen.
- You can vote on which groups are most dangerous/the biggest threats.
- You can do both!
- Select the top 5 (this number is at your discretion) and take 5 minutes per group to discuss in more depth, as well as potential risk mitigation strategies for each.