A pre-mortem, or premortem, is a
managerial strategy in which a project team imagines that a project or organization has failed, and then works backward to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the project or organization.
The technique breaks possible
groupthink
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesivenes ...
ing by facilitating a positive discussion on threats, increasing the likelihood the main threats are identified. Management can then reduce the chances of failure due to
heuristics
A heuristic or heuristic technique (''problem solving'', '' mental shortcut'', ''rule of thumb'') is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless ...
and
biases
Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is inaccurate, closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individ ...
such as
overconfidence
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective ''confidence'' in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective ''accuracy'' of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfide ...
and
planning fallacy
The planning fallacy is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed. This phenomenon sometimes occurs regardless of the individual's knowl ...
by analyzing the magnitude and likelihood of each threat, and take preventive actions to protect the project or organization from suffering an untimely "death". It formalizes and expands on the acknowledgedly much older concept of prospective hindsight (Mitchell, Russo, and Pennington 1989) in which participants "look back from the future" to identify problems before they occur.
According to a
Harvard Business Review
''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. ''HBR'' is published six times a year ...
article from 2007, "unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what ''might'' go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the 'patient' has died, and so asks what ''did'' go wrong."
The pre-mortem analysis seeks to identify threats and weaknesses via the hypothetical presumption of near-future failure. But if that presumption is incorrect, then the analysis may be identifying threats/weaknesses that are not in fact real.
See also
*
Kickoff meeting
A kickoff meeting is the first meeting with the project team and with or without the client of the project. This meeting would follow definition of the base elements for the project and other project planning activities. This meeting introduces ...
*
Postmortem documentation
A project post-mortem is a process used to identify the causes of a project failure (or significant business-impairing downtime), and how to prevent them in the future. This is different from a Retrospective, in which both positive and negative thi ...
References
Business analysis
Project management
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