Pre-Mortem
for Major Programmes

Traditional approaches to risk management have been widely criticised as based on a ‘predict and control’ model which fails to adequately account for the complexity and uncertainty inherent in major programmes.

A pre-mortem may be the best way to circumvent a painful post-mortem. It is a forward-looking technique whereby failure is assumed, and time is spent contemplating reasons and implications of that failure. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which team members are asked what might go wrong, the pre-mortem operates on the assumption that the programme has failed spectacularly, and asks: What did go wrong? The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure before turning their attention to mitigating actions.