The Pre-Post Mortem

Years ago, I worked for a company doing Smalltalk development. These were some of the brightest people I'd ever worked with; they were very committed to the projects they worked on -- yet the results were so often dismally the same: failure.

We developed a routine: after a failure, we'd repair to the local Mexican restaurant (this was L.A. where they know Mexican food!), drink Margaritas, and commiserate. Very often during these post mortems (lit. 'after deaths'), it would happen that someone had anticipated the failure before any coding was done.

Years later, when developing for myself the process that would become FLiP, I thought about those post mortems and wondered, "What would happen if we held the post mortem before the project began?" Could we actually discover the project risks before they made themselves so ingloriously known?

I began experimenting with clients. "Suppose," I began, "that a year from now, this project has turned out to be a failure. I know that we don't want to think of that, but humore me for there's method to my madness. The question is this: why did it fail?"

Well, it turned out that in many cases, someone was aware of the Big Risk, but in the normal flow of events, one doesn't raise unpleasant issues. The idea of the pre-post mortem is that it gives everyone permission to explore the negative side of projects: risk.

Once we started doing this, we knew where to focus our "risk mitigation strategies" -- where, in simpler words, Murphy was most likely to appear. Then, we normally devised a plan to work around the risk. And, amazing to me, the failures stopped.

Most of the time, they stopped because we saw what was coming and were able to head it off. A small percent of the time, we realized that the risk was so great that the project wasn't worth undertaking. The difference -- to our bottom line, to customer satisfaction, to developer morale -- was immense.

You might want to just try this on your next project. I hold pre-post mortem meetings with the client and I find they appreciate it -- once they get over the idea that I've completely lost my mind.