Each Monday we focus on one activity you can do today or over the next week to build yourself a better business. These short, actionable posts will show you what steps you need to take to take your business to the next level.
In case you’ve missed the previous posts, you can catch up here: 20 Days to Build A Better Business.
This is Day 14: Conduct a PreMortem
When projects go live many of them have a few teething problems. Sometimes projects go completely wrong and there’s a lot of work to fix the problems, or in some situations back out the project.
When the dust has settled many projects have a post project review which is sometimes called a post implementation review or sometimes a project post mortem, where the project manager conducts some navel gazing with the project team to find out what went wrong, what went well and what lessons could be learned for next time.
The trouble with post project reviews
Is that when a project has ended, it’s sometimes difficult to get the team back together. People have moved on to other things or maybe left the company. Another problem is that it’s unlikely that you’ll ever run exactly the same project again, so even though you might learn some valuable lessons, you’ll never get to use them.
But the biggest problem with post project reviews is that they happen after the project when the problems have happeneed.
Imagine if you could tackle any problems before they happened and fix them so they didn’t become a problem after all. Wouldn’t that be a better place to be?
So, instead of holding a review after the project has gone live, hold the review before the project goes live.
Hold a premortem
To hold a project premortem gather the key people involved in the project together and brainstorm all the things that could go wrong. Then work out solutions to each of the issues you identify so that you can fix them before the issues become major problems when the project has gone live.
On a large project it might be worthwhile holding several project premortems to identify other issues which may have arisen after the first set of issues have been fixed.
Holding a project premortem will make for a far more effective project implementation or product launch.
So, for your next project or launch, ditch the project post mortem and hold a premortem instead.
