Post Mortem, but before Death

Justice Gray sent me an interesting note the other day in which he described a "post mortem" debriefing, but before the project had even started.  As Justice put it:  “It’s six months/a year/etc. from now and the project has failed.  Why did it fail?”

One of the things that people have a hard time doing is learning from their mistakes.  George Santayana said "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" and that is very true in the IT industry.  We work on projects that are months long, sometimes years, and during each project we make mistakes, fix them and go on to another mistake.  By the end of the project we have discovered, and fixed, dozens of mistakes.  We then make the biggest mistake of all, however, and repeat those mistakes on the very next project.  We failed to learn from our mistakes.

By setting up a post mortem before the project even starts, however, you're asking the developers to think about the project, think about what has gone wrong on previous projects and apply those lessons to the new project.  In essence we are learning from our mistakes and applying the fixes to the next project. 

Does this work?  Well, from my personal experience I've had mixed results.  We did this for a couple of smaller projects and we were quite successful at identifying potential problems early on and work on risk mitigation for those items.  And that is what we are talking about:  risk mitigation.  Identifying a potential problem and what can be done early on to minimize the odds of it happening.  We also tried this same approach on a much bigger project, but the whole process blew up in our faces.  We identified so many potential problems that we spent more time mitigating risk than we did building an application.  And even after all of that advance preparation, we were hit with some nasty problems that derailed the project because of a couple of people who were not committed to the process.

Can this work, discussing potential failures before the project starts?  Most definitely, but it is really important that people think about past mistakes and problems and how to mitigate the risk of them occurring.  It also depends on the commitment of the people involved.  If the people aren't committed to the process then the results may not be what you expect, or need.