Julie Green, Con-way Enterprises
Post-Mortem or Retrospective Meetings can be too little, too late. These kinds of exercises are sometimes too focused on the project in question. That level of specificity makes it difficult to generalize the output enough to apply it to the next batch of work. As a result, many lessons learned are filed away and never implemented. Even when a team intends to use what their new-found knowledge, it becomes extra work that is eventually abandoned. Instead of Post-Mortem or Retrospective Meetings, your ability to predict failures can be increased up to 30% by holding a Pre-Mortem.
Pre-Mortems are meetings that happen before the project, iteration or sprint has ended. A Pre-Mortem meeting creates a safe environment where the sole purpose is to predict failure. Instead of a gripe session, the Pre-Mortem is structured so that attendees are asked for a few areas where they think issues will occur. Then everyone is asked if there is one thing they can do to stop the problem from happening. The list of action items is generated from each person’s “one thing that they can do.”
Using the Pre-Mortem strategy you can stop these failures from occurring.
Target Audience: Introductory
2015 Technical Paper, Julie Green, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
