Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #03
Show Notes:
Welcome to Business Bites! This week I will be discussing the concept Project Pre-Mortem. You may be familiar with the term of a postmortem, which typically refers to reviewing something after the fact, whether it's a project, a task, or some other thing that's been completed. And typically, what's done is we discuss the achievements, the failures, and the opportunities with those that are involved. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode!
Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.
Episode #03: Business Bites: Project Pre-Mortem
Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. Today, we're going to be talking about a project premortem.
You may be familiar with the term of a postmortem, which typically refers to reviewing something after the fact, whether it's a project, a task, or some other thing that's been completed. And typically, what's done is we discuss the achievements, the failures, and the opportunities with those that are involved. But the term today, project premortem actually has a history in another term called prospective hindsight.
Prospective hindsight was first discovered and developed by Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington in the late '80s. What they were able to find was that our ability to do prospective hindsight, so imagining as if it had already occurred to correctly identify reasons for the future outcomes by more than 30%. Because of that, using that prospective hindsight helped identify the term of a premortem. A premortem was identified by Gary Klein in early 2007. When thinking about ways to look at projects from that same light, often in organizations we find that projects can fail for a number of different reasons. An opportunity that we have is by utilizing a project premortem to have a meeting about the project before it gets started helps anticipate the problems that might happen along the course of that project.
Thinking about how to conduct this would be to organize a meeting with the team and think through the project as if the project had already ended. What are some of the ways that this project could fail? Identifying the reasons for the different types of failure in that project situation helps ensure that the team is aware of them before they occur and is able to manage them in advance rather than in hindsight.
Thinking about utilizing a project premortem is a lot easier than you may anticipate. Thinking about bringing that team together and identifying those situations can become a regular part of your project kickoff. How could you be able to use this to catch problems with a particular project or issues that people may feel uncomfortable bringing up before they become a situation?
This has been Sara with Business Bites. And you can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on what other business terminology that you'd like to be bite-sized. As always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend.
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