Pre Mortem Template

This is a premortem template based on the Atlassian premortem playbook (https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook/plays/pre-mortem). It is ideally run with two facilitators or one facilitator and an assistant.

A premortem is a project planning activity using suturing techniques. By imagining the project at its conclusion, including the aspects that have gone wrong—or right—you will identify steps and activities to put in place to prevent or mitigate risks and issues and increase your chances of project success.

In brief, the steps are:

1) Brief your team—Invite your project team and governance folks to your Miro space and create a workshop agenda.

2) Ask attendees to think about what could go wrong with the project—and what would go right if the project succeeds. On this board, those ideas will be categorized as blockers or enablers. There are some thinking prompts under each of the blocker and enabler tiles.

3) Allow brainstorm time! Use the Act tile for participants to capture something that's on their mind that doesn't easily fall into the category of blocker or enabler.

4) Spend some time discussing after you brainstorm. It is helpful to have one of the facilitators or the assistant group similar items and start to identify where themes have emerged. Use the Themes tile to start to articulate these. Put things outside your project that aren't useful to discuss here in the Out of Scope zone—make sure you capture these and identify a time the team can revisit them if needed outside the session.

5) If time permits, use the voting cards or emoticons to vote to identify the stickies you've identified that are the biggest threat to the project succeeding. Each person gets 3 votes that they can distribute however they want.

6) Repeat the brainstorming, discussion, and voting process, focusing on measures of success.

7) Using the insights you've gleaned together from the themes and key blockers and enablers, identify actions that you will follow up on and who on the team is responsible for doing so.