IT Projects are big challenges. Despite the incredible collection of tools and platforms that have emerged during the last decade to simplify projects and reduce risk, 50% of surveyed companies responding to a 2013 questionnaire reported having an IT Project failure. For a variety of reasons, it is unlikely we can ever know how many projects really fail. Companies tend to not want to talk about things that didn’t go right, and as a result we’re left with an environment ripe for survivor bias which can make it look like getting a project successfully across the finish line is far easier than it actually is.
It’s impossible to completely protect your project from failure, but being open and honest about risks can help. I talked about that in our article on The Devil’s Advocate, but there is an exercise which your team can conduct which may help identify some of the hidden risks for your project.
Gary Klein, author of Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, re-framed the risk-analysis phase of project planning into an exercise where the participants imagine that the project has already failed catastrophically. Now, from that perspective of an already failed effort, they are asked to describe what went wrong. Klein wrote about the process in Harvard Business Review, and it was also covered in detail in The Great Courses: The Art of Critical Decision Making. Here is a simplified list of the steps for the exercise:
- Identify the team members who will participate in the exercise.
- Ensure that all participants understand the goal of the exercise, which is to visualize the failure scenario in as much detail as possible — preferably with a detached and clinical perspective.
- Imagine the complete failure of the project. Visualize it in as much detail as possible.
- Collaboratively capture the process flow which led to failure(s).
- Categorize your failure scenarios and assign a probability that these scenarios would come true.
- Rank the scenarios by severity and by likelihood.
- If the project proceeds, can these failures be mitigated or prevented?
- Document learning from the exercise.
- At the end of the project, review the pre-mortem and compare with actual post-mortem results. Did you avoid project stumbling blocks due to the exercise?
Risk analysis should always be part of a project, but this exercise involves more than a mere academic look at the possible failure points. By forcing the participants to imagine the disaster has already happened, it puts them in a different thought-space to consider the problems and challenges to the project. The fear of failure is often a bigger pain point than actual failure, and by imagining you’re past that it may free up the imagination to consider factors which normally might be blocked or obscured. Pretending failure is not an option does not prepare one for the real challenges that can arise in projects like this, but the pre-mortem analysis exercise can be a path to accounting for these factors without getting bogged down in emotion.
