A good leader, gives the team a logical reason to think and emotional support to act – relentlessly to achieve organisational goal.
Project failures often occurs because of our flawed thoughts; assumptions aren’t true all the time. They often cause great projects to fail measurably or achieve marginal success, putting organisations in a well known Columbus Syndrome.
By conducting an extensive pre-mortem on your project, will help you to avoid falling in this trap.
As its name suggest pre-mortem is the opposite of the project post-mortem. A post-mortem identifies mistakes after a project has failed. In a pre-mortem, however, you identify the major causes of project failure in a creative way before the start of a project by imagining the project has already failed. This exercise enables you to anticipate roadblocks beforehand and significantly increase the success rate of your endeavour.
Here is how a pre-mortem team exercise works:
- Imagine five years in the future, your project has failed so miserably that you’ve been asked for an interview by the Harvard Business Review to talk about the reasons for your failure.
- The project team divides into small subgroups (Technical, Operations, Managers, Sponsors and Product Owner) to discuss, what would be said in this interview.
- All subgroups then report on their insights. The total feedback will give a clear picture of the main internal project risks. Steps to mitigate these risks can then be incorporated into the project design from the start.
If you conduct a pre-mortem with a group of external subject experts, you will also quickly identify not only the main risks, but also the hidden opportunities. This knowledge will often be a great eye opener and will be invaluable to almost guaranteed project success.
