Have you ever heard of the concept of a project pre-mortem? Have you ever used the concept on one of your OSS projects?
They can be a really useful technique to use prior to embarking on OSS projects. But what are they and how do you use them I can hear you asking.
Think of it as projecting forward and you’re doing a project post-mortem when the project has failed miserably. It hasn’t achieved any of the objectives that you wanted or delivered on any of the business value you outlined in the business case…
…But you’re doing this exercise before the project has even started. Before anything has actually failed miserably.
This process allows all of your stakeholders to voice their concerns, raise risks, identify problems (and potential catastrophes). It sets the task for all the clever people on your team to put on a big black hat and tell you all the reasons why they think the project will fail.
Once you collate all the inputs from the team, it will give you the opportunity to mitigate many of the big and small challenges that are proposed. But perhaps more importantly, it gives you a great starting point for your ongoing change management processes. It allows you to listen to the fears and problems being raised from a larger group of people, giving a broader perspective of the context in which the project will be implemented.
The process of listening, considering and responding is an important stage of the empathy process that should precede any OSS implementation. As an implementation team, it’s quite possible that you will simply hand over your finished project and not have to deal with the day-to-day shortcomings of what you’ve implemented. Project pre-mortems are a useful exercise in getting to understand the challenges and constraints faced by operational teams.
Have you used this technique before? What other techniques have you used to help with change management on complex projects like OSS transformations? What other risk mitigation techniques do you recommend?
When it comes to digital transformations, we’re all constantly learning, so we’d love to hear ideas that help to de-risk our projects. Leave us a note in the comments below.
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