A project planning technique where teams imagine a project has failed and work backwards to identify what could go wrong, helping combat the planning fallacy by surfacing potential obstacles and risks before they occur.
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A premortem is a managerial strategy where a team imagines that a project has failed and then works backward to determine what potentially could have led to the failure. This technique helps combat optimism bias and the planning fallacy in project planning.
Imagine it's 6-12 months in the future and your project has completely failed.
Individually, team members write down all the reasons why the project failed.
Go around the room having each person share one reason at a time until all reasons are captured.
Rank the identified risks by likelihood and potential impact.
For the highest-priority risks, develop specific mitigation strategies.
Team members feel psychologically safe sharing concerns they might otherwise suppress.
Many identified failure reasons relate to time: scope creep, technical debt, dependencies, etc.
Once risks are explicit, can add appropriate buffer time to estimates.
Proactive mitigation prevents delays before they occur.
The planning fallacy causes teams to:
Premortem directly counters this by:
Premortem Failure Reasons Identified:
Impact on Time Estimate:
Conduct premortem after planning but before execution begins.
Emphasize this is about surfacing risks, not assigning blame.
Vague concerns ("delays happen") are less useful than specific scenarios ("API vendor has 2-week response time for support tickets").
Capture all identified risks for reference during the project.
Update risk assessment as project progresses.
Developed by psychologist Gary Klein, based on research into decision-making and prospective hindsight (imagining an event has occurred increases perceived likelihood of causes).
Record which premortem risks actually occurred and their time impact.
Use historical premortem accuracy to refine future risk identification.
Check if time budgeted for risk mitigation was sufficient.